At age 14, Aaron Hillel Swartz (Highland Park, Illinois, 8 November 1986) helped write RSS 1.0. At 26, on 11 January 2013, he died in his Brooklyn apartment while the US Department of Justice prosecuted him for downloading academic articles. Between those two points: Creative Commons, Markdown, Reddit, Open Library, PACER, the open access manifesto and the campaign that defeated SOPA. This text is a technical biography — without poster martyrdom, without softening the prosecution.
Highland Park: a wiki at 12, RSS at 14
The son of Robert and Susan Swartz, Aaron programmed early. At 12 he built The Info Network, a wiki before Wikipedia; it was among the ArsDigita Prize finalists. At 14 he was in the W3C RDF working group, with Tim Berners-Lee, and emerged as a coauthor of the RSS 1.0 specification — the format that still feeds feed readers, podcasts and much of the web that does not fit into a social network’s algorithm.
He dropped out of high school. He attended Stanford and left. The pattern would repeat: big institution, impatience, his own project.
Creative Commons, Markdown and web.py
Lawrence Lessig brought him into the newborn Creative Commons. Aaron wrote the license architecture in machine-readable form — the RDF behind the CC badge. Without that, “CC BY” would be just a legal PDF. With it, it became metadata.
With John Gruber, he helped finalize Markdown syntax. He wrote the Python framework web.py, deliberately minimal, used in production at Reddit and in dozens of small tools. The taste was the same in everything: a simple, specifiable format that anyone could implement.
Infogami, Reddit and Condé Nast
At Y Combinator, Aaron’s Infogami merged with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian’s Reddit. Condé Nast bought the combined company. Aaron suddenly became an employee in a Wired office. It did not last: corporate culture, magazine pace, zero interest. He left in 2007 with vesting money and the reputation of a cofounder — credit Huffman did not always like sharing, and which the product’s history only partly justifies. What he actually did: code, web.py, architectural stubbornness.
Then came Open Library, at Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive: a public catalog of all books, not just those a bookstore wants to sell. The obsession was the same as RSS: information that already exists, locked up by format, price or ToS.
PACER, 2008: public documents with a toll
PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) charges per page of federal court filings — documents that are already public. With Carl Malamud, Aaron wrote a Perl script that, using libraries with free access, downloaded about 2,7 million documents and put them outside the paywall. The FBI opened an investigation. No charges were filed.
That same year he published the Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto: the thesis that locking publicly funded science behind publishers is a political error, not a copyright detail. The text is short, militant and, for the Department of Justice, would come to be read as intent.
JSTOR, MIT and the CFAA
Between September 2010 and January 2011, Aaron connected a laptop to the MIT network — guest account, unlocked network closet, script — and downloaded JSTOR’s collection in bulk, a digital library of academic papers. JSTOR, after receiving the disks back, did not want to prosecute. MIT wavered. The federal government did not.
On 6 January 2011 MIT police arrested him. Massachusetts prosecutors (Carmen Ortiz, Stephen Heymann) framed the case under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act: dozens of federal charges, theoretical sentences in the 30 to 50 year range and millions in fines, depending on the current indictment. The 1986 CFAA treats “unauthorized access” with the same wording that covers both bank intruders and users who violate terms of use. Aaron did not sell the files, take down a service or demand ransom. The prosecution continued anyway. A plea deal with actual prison time was on the table; he rejected the terms.
SOPA, Demand Progress, 11 January
Meanwhile, in 2010, he founded Demand Progress. In 2012 the group was central to opposing SOPA/PIPA — bills that would have given the government and copyright holders a button to take down DNS for sites accused of piracy. The Wikipedia blackout and Congress’s retreat are the chapter in which US Internet politics still cites his name with pride.
On 11 January 2013, Aaron was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment. He was 26 years old. His family declared: his death was not just a personal tragedy, it was the product of a criminal justice system of intimidation and prosecutorial overreach. Tim Berners-Lee wrote: “Aaron dead. World wanderers, we have lost a wise elder.” The documentary The Internet’s Own Boy (2014) reconstructs the case. “Aaron’s Law”, an attempt to narrow the CFAA, did not pass.
Timeline
- 8 November 1986 — born in Highland Park, Illinois.
- 1999 — at 12, creates The Info Network, a collaborative encyclopedia predating Wikipedia.
- 2000 — at 14, participates in the specification of RSS 1.0.
- 2001–2002 — works on Creative Commons and creates Markdown together with John Gruber.
- 2005 — founds Infogami, which merges with Reddit; writes web.py.
- 2006 — Condé Nast buys Reddit; he leaves shortly afterward.
- 2008 — bulk-downloads documents from PACER, a system that charged for public court records. The FBI investigates and closes the case.
- 2010 — founds Demand Progress and leads the campaign against SOPA, which is eventually defeated.
- 6 January 2011 — arrested for downloading articles from JSTOR on the MIT network.
- 2011–2013 — faces charges under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, with combined sentences exceeding thirty years.
- 11 January 2013 — dies at age 26.
Wrap-up
RSS still delivers what social media feeds refuse. Creative Commons is the default for Wikipedia, Commons, paper preprints and much of what this blog can republish. Markdown is the syntax used to write READMEs, posts and laws. PACER still charges. JSTOR opened more of its collection. The CFAA remains broad.
Swartz is no repository saint: the bulk download at MIT was deliberate, the manifesto accepted the risk, the prosecution was disproportionate. All three facts fit in the same paragraph. What does not fit is treating the outcome as a footnote about a “prodigy who passed away”. He built formats. The formats remained. So did the prosecution.
In the same thread on this blog: open source pioneers, Linus Torvalds and the perennial tension between open source and the rest of the law.
Cover illustration drawn from a photograph of Aaron Swartz available on Wikimedia Commons, under the CC BY 2.0 license.
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