The family of a Reddit co-founder who committed suicide weeks before he was to go on trial on charges that he stole millions of scholarly articles is blaming prosecutors for his death.
Aaron Swartz committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment. His death has sparked grief and anger from online rights advocates.
“Aaron did more than almost anyone to make the internet a thriving ecosystem for open knowledge, and to keep it that way,” wrote Peter Eckersley from the California-based activist group Electronic Frontier Foundation.
David Moon of Swartz’s anti-internet censorship group Demand Progress said the hacktivist “refined advocacy for the progressive and open-information movement”.
Swartz, 26, had been due to stand trial in April for allegedly breaking into a closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to plug into the computer network and download millions of academic journal articles from the subscription-only JSTOR service.