The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet

In 2013, Aaron Swartz took his own life while under indictment by the U.S. government for downloading large amounts of licensed material from the JSTOR database. Swartz was 26 years old when he died yet had already worked on significant projects including Creative Commons, the semantic web, Reddit, and SOPA/PIPA protests. He saw the Internet as a tool for bettering humanity by opening access to knowledge. His life and death have come to represent larger struggles over access to information—namely, should public access be guaranteed to all or should corporations profit by limiting access? Peters (Slate correspondent; contributing editor, Columbia Journalism Review) uses Swartz's story to explore the larger history of copyright, academic publishing, and digital technologies. Copyright is a complex issue, but the author makes it far more approachable by weaving in the accounts of key players such as dictionary creator Noah Webster, who sought copyright protections in the 19th century, and Michael Hart, who conceptualized Project Gutenberg in the late 20th century. Overall, this book invites readers to consider how society values access to information, as suggested by Swartz's life.