Aaron Swartz, one of the minds behind online social news giant Reddit, killed himself in New York City Friday. The 26-year-old was a precocious coding talent, co-authoring the first generation of RSS — a core part of the modern Internet experience — at 14 years old. Swartz joined Reddit through a merger with his own Infogami service in 2006. After leaving Reddit, he devoted himself to Internet activism, co-founding the advocacy group demandprogress.org. Swartz was facing legal pressures, after his 2011 indictment for allegedly mass-downloading documents from the JSTOR academic archive with intent to distribute them. Swartz was open about his ongoing battle with severe depression and other medical problems. His suicide was confirmed by an uncle, Michael Wolf. [Source]

sportchampps;1364882 wrote:He shouldn't have even been charged with a felony

dlazz;1365182 wrote:Yes, he should have. He was stealing.

dlazz;1365182 wrote:Yes, he should have. He was stealing.

sportchampps;1365616 wrote:What he did wasn't illegal at most all he did was trespass

justincredible;1365538 wrote:There is no way he should've been facing 35 years in prison. Especially since the place he was "stealing" from didn't pursue charges and was in the process of making them publicly accessible anyway.

dlazz;1365633 wrote: Breaking the law is breaking the law.

dlazz;1365633 wrote:Copyright infringement cases always bring absurd charges like that when they're on a grand scale. He was more or less grabbing thousands of copyrighted journals and posting them for free. That is a felony since he was doing it on a grand-scale without regard.

Yes, that's illegal.
Yes, he should've gotten in trouble.

It doesn't matter if the company was getting ready to release them anyway. Breaking the law is breaking the law.

I Wear Pants;1365670 wrote: Society is not better off by having this guy behind bars for 35 years for distributing (alledgedly) academic journals.

I Wear Pants;1365670 wrote:This is a pretty absurd statement.

sportchampps;1365770 wrote:He never distributed the articles.

He faced 13 felony charges, including wire fraud, computer fraud and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.

dlazz;1365774 wrote:No, but he still broke the law.