http://cptv.vo.llnwd.net/o2/ypmwebcontent/Commodore%20Skahill/Colin%20McEnroe%20Show%2001-17-2013.mp3
Last Friday a young man named Aaron Swartz hanged himself.
Most of us had never heard of him but in the upper echelons of the digital community, he was a legend, having helped develop the software for RSS feeds when he was 14 and having helped create the site Reddit a few years later.
Swartz became an Internet activist, committed to the free flow of information. And that's eventually what got him in trouble. Swartz opposed online operations that charged users for information which, he was convinced, had already been paid for in some other way.
One of his last targets was JSTOR, an online warehouse of academic journal articles.
Swartz used MIT computers to download millions of JSTOR articles. He may have been planning an analysis that showed how the research behind the articles was funded. Or he may have planned to share the articles for free.
What happened instead is the story we'll tell today.
You can join the conversation. E-mail colin@wnpr.org or Tweet us @wnprcolin.
