Originally a comment by Harald Hanche-Olsen on The withdrawing room.
I just finished watching Brian Knappenberger’s documentary on Aaron Swartz – The Internet’s own boy. Driven to suicide by overly aggressive prosecutors seeking to making an example of him for wanting to make knowledge available to everybody, Aaron was likely one of the brightest minds of his generation and a tragic loss to all. Have a look at Lawrence Lessig’s TED talk on The unstoppable walk to political reform to learn about just one important aspect of Aaron’s life.
The documentary is well worth watching. I believe it is screening in US movie theaters starting today. I got a copy because I backed the movie financially albeit very modestly. But at least if you are in the US, you can rent or buy the movie on vimeo. I should warn you that it is emotionally wrenching, but that is as it should be.
Ophelia: If you can edit the HTML directly, do get rid of the text class=”comment-link” at the a tags and the span tags containg these. That should fix the formatting problems, I think. And feel free to delete this comment when done.
The movie is now also available for download on archive.org, free of charge – and quite legally so, I think. it comes with a Creative Commons license, after all. Which is quite fitting, as Aaron did have a hand in establishing the Creative Commons.
Harald (and Ophelia), thank you so very much for this news. I’ve wanted to understand the case more, to understand what MIT could have done differently. Ideally I should read Hal Abelson’s report. I’ll download the movie tomorrow and make the time to watch it.