The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz

The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz (2014) is a documentary you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Brian Knappenberger. It follows Aaron Swartz — co-author of the RSS standard at 14, early contributor to Reddit, and one of the architects of Creative Commons — through his activism and his destruction by the federal legal system.

When Swartz downloaded millions of academic articles from JSTOR using MIT's network, prosecutors hit him with charges that carried 35 years in prison and a million-dollar fine. He was 26. The film does not editorialize much; it lets people like Tim Berners-Lee, Lawrence Lessig, and Cory Doctorow describe what happened and what it meant. The gap between what Swartz actually did and what the government tried to do to him for it is the argument the film is making.

Director Knappenberger built a portrait of someone who was too fast, too principled, and too inconvenient for the institutions he challenged. Stream The Internet's Own Boy (2014) online on iFILM.