‘On the Internet, No One Knows You’re a Child’: The Short Life of Aaron Swartz, at Sundance
PARK CITY, Utah, January 23, 2014 - On the internet, no one knows you're a child.
That, at least, was the message I took from watching the film about the life of Aaron Swartz. The film, "The Internet's Own Boy," premiered this week here at the Sundance Film Festival, during which it received a sustained standing ovation.
The documentary is a biography of, and tribute to, the all-too-short life of Swartz, who died a year ago this month, at age 26.
Swartz had been under intense pressure from the federal prosecutors in Massachusetts. Criminal charges filed against him, if proven, could have imprisoned him for 35 years. Those charges stemmed from Swartz's having downloaded millions of articles from JSTOR, a digital library of academic journals, onto a computer at the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While it is unclear what Swartz intended to do with the articles, it seems implausible that he would have republished them in an act of copyright infringement.
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