Aaron Swartz
More info
- Born
- Died
- Known for
- RSS 1.0, Reddit, Demand Progress
- Nationality
- American
Co-wrote the RSS specification at fourteen and went on to build a sizeable part of the open web's infrastructure.
At fourteen he took part in the working group behind RSS 1.0, and shortly afterwards in the technical architecture for Creative Commons licence metadata. His company Infogami merged with Reddit, which he left after the acquisition. He worked on web standards, built libraries still in use, and ran the campaign organisation Demand Progress, which was central to stopping the SOPA bill in 2012.
In 2011 he downloaded a large number of academic papers from JSTOR over MIT's network. Prosecutors charged him under the vaguely worded computer intrusion statute CFAA, with sentencing exposure counted in decades. He took his own life in January 2013, aged 26. The case set off a still-unresolved debate about proportionality in American computer crime law.