A co-founder of the social news website Reddit and activist who fought to make online content free to the public has been found dead, authorities have confirmed, prompting an outpouring of grief from prominent voices on the intersection of free speech and the Web.
Aaron Swartz, 26, hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment weeks before he was to go on trial on accusations that he stole millions of journal articles from an electronic archive in an attempt to make them freely available.
He was pronounced dead on Friday evening at his home in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights neighborhood, said Ellen Borakove, spokeswoman for New York’s chief medical examiner.
Swartz was a prodigy who as a young teenager helped create RSS, a family of Web feed formats used to gather updates from blogs, news headlines, audio and video for users.
He later co-founded Reddit, which ended up being sold to Conde Nast, as well as the political action group Demand Progress, which campaigns against Internet censorship.
In 2011, he was arrested in Boston and charged with stealing millions of articles from a computer archive at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Prosecutors said he broke into a computer wiring closet on campus and used his laptop for the downloads.
Swartz pleaded not guilty to charges including wire fraud.
His federal trial was to begin next month. If convicted, he faced decades in prison and a fortune in fines.
Some legal experts considered the case unfounded, saying that MIT allows guests access to the articles and Swartz, a fellow at Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics, was a guest.
According to a federal indictment, Swartz stole the documents from JSTOR, a subscription service used by MIT that offers digitized copies of articles from academic journals.
Prosecutors said he intended to distribute the articles on file-sharing websites.
He faced 13 felony charges, including breaching site terms and intending to share downloaded files through peer-to-peer networks, computer fraud, wire fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer, and criminal forfeiture.
JSTOR did not press charges once it reclaimed the articles from Swartz.
