Aaron Swartz’s life is one that everyone can learn from. He started from simply liking computers and the internet to changing the fate of the internet. Without using large sums of money or even calling upon large, powerful companies for support, Aaron was able to begin the movement against the PIPA and SOPA bills in 2011 and 2012. Instead of waiting for someone else to be the first to stand up to what he thought was wrong, Aaron did anything he could possible do in order to achieve what he believe in, even if it meant downloading millions of articles from JSTOR illegally.
Timeline of Swartz’s Life:
1986
On November 8, Aaron Swartz was born in Chicago, Illinois to Susan and Robert Swartz. From a young age, Aaron Swartz was very interested in computers, programming, and the internet. Swartz attended a private school called North Shore Country Day School in Winnetka, Illinois.
2000
When Swartz was 13 years old, he won the annual ArsDigita Prize for young people who created “useful, educational, and collaborative†nonprofit websites. The website that Swartz created was known as The Info Network, a knowledge database that anyone could contribute to and anyone could read.
2001
Swartz joined the Working Group (WG) when he was 14 and helped create the RSS 1.0, a very early version of the modern RSS. The RSS is a standardized web feed format for websites that are updated regularly such as blogs and news websites.
Unknown Date
Swartz co-contributed to the creation of Markdown with John Gruber. Markdown was a format that made HTML easier for humans to type and edit.
2004
Swartz attended Stanford University for college, but dropped out after only a year.
2005
Swartz created a software company called Infogami which was a template for websites. He then merged Infogami with Reddit in November. Swartz also created his own website called webpy.org as a framework that uses Infogami for any website creator to use.
2006
Conde Nast Publications, the owners of Wired magazine, acquired Reddit and Swartz had to move to San Francisco to work on the Wired Magazine. Unfortunately, Swartz stated in his personal blog that “I was miserable. I couldn’t stand San Francisco. I couldn’t stand office life. I couldn’t stand Wired. I took a long Christmas vacation. I got sick. I thought of suicide. I ran from the police. And when I got back on Monday morning, I was asked to resign.â€
Swartz also volunteered as an editor for Wikipedia.
2007
Swartz helped Simon Carstensen launch Jottit using Swartz’s Infogami framework. Jottit is a very website for creating simple web pages by simply typing into a textbox, similar to Google Sites and Blogger, except simpler.
2008
Swartz downloaded and released about 20% of the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) database from the United States federal court documents. PACER was charging 8 cents per page for viewers to read its documents, a fee that Swartz was against and decided to take action against.
2010
Swartz founded the Demand Progress, an organization aimed to use petitions in order to create a legal movement against internet censorship. The organization was first founded to fight against the COICA bill (Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act). After Swartz gained enough support to delay the COICA bill, which appeared about a year later as the PIPA and SOPA bills, which Swartz again was able to get the support from millions of people and from companies such as Google in order to not allow the bill to pass.
2010-2011
Over the course of a few weeks from late 2010 to early 2011, Swartz downloaded a very large number of articles from JSTOR in MIT since MIT allowed access to JSTOR through their campus network. JSTOR is a digital archive of academic journal articles that required viewers to pay a fee in order to view those academic journals.
On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested and charged with with wire fraud, computer fraud, illegal obtaining of information from a protected computer and damaging a protected computer, even though both JSTOR and MIT did not pursue Swartz at all. Swartz faced 35 years in prison and a fine of one million dollars. Unfortunately, instead of accepting the punishment, Swartz instead chose death. On January 11, 2013, Swartz was found dead after hanging himself.
