The Boy Who Could Change the World, book review: A tantalising legacy | ZDNet

"What most people know about Aaron Swartz is that he stole (if you're a journal publisher), copied (if you're a journalist being neutral), or liberated (if you're a hacker or work for Google) millions of journal articles from a service called JSTOR and, under threat of prosecution, committed suicide at 26. A taste of the internet's reaction to his death can be seen in the trailer for the 2014 documentary film about his life, The Internet's Own Boy (YouTube). As this and the obits that followed his death in 2013 made plain, Swartz's short life was crammed with an unusual amount of incident. He helped create RSS, Creative Commons, SecureDrop, and Reddit, campaigned against SOPA, and was a research fellow for Lawrence Lessig's lab on institutional corruption. Through all that, as the recent book The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz makes plain, he was also a prolific writer and blogger on all sorts of topics ..."