Henry Farrell on Aaron Swartz.

His guest posts at Crooked Timber.

I sort of agree with the generous broad view he takes in the post on Toward a Larger Left.

Corey Doctorow via DeLong

JSTOR

JSTOR (pronounced jay-stor;[3] short for Journal Storage) is a digital library founded in 1995. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now also includes books and primary sources, and current issues of journals.[4] It provides full-text searches of more than a thousand journals, dating back to 1665 in the case of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. More than 7,000 institutions in more than 150 countries have access to JSTOR. Most access is by subscription, but some old public domain content is freely available to anyone, and in 2012 JSTOR launched a program of free access to some further articles for individual scholars and researchers who register.

On July 19, 2011, internet activist Aaron Swartz was charged with data theft in relation to bulk-downloading academic journal articles from JSTOR.[9] According to the indictment against him, Swartz surreptitiously attached a laptop to MIT's computer network, which allowed him to "rapidly download an extraordinary volume of articles from JSTOR".[10] Prosecutors in the case say Swartz acted with the intention of making the papers available on P2P file-sharing sites.[11] Swartz surrendered to authorities, pleaded not guilty to all counts and was released on $100,000 bail. Prosecution of the case is ongoing.[12] Two days later, on July 21, Greg Maxwell published a torrent file of a 32-GB archive of 18,592 academic papers from JSTOR's Royal Society collection, via The Pirate Bay, in protest against Swartz' prosecution.[13][14] 

From September 6, 2011, JSTOR has made some public domain content freely available to anyone.[15] JSTOR stated that they had been working on making it free for some time, and the Swartz controversy made them "press ahead" with the initiative.[16]

Swartz committed suicide yesterday at the age of 26.

Swartz's father worked in the computer industry, and from a young age Aaron was interested in computing, frequently studying computers, the Internet and Internet culture.[3] At the age of 14 Swartz co-authored RSS 1.0 Specification. He later attended Stanford University, however he left after one year of studying, stating 'I didn't find it a very intellectual atmosphere, since most of the other kids seemed profoundly unconcerned with their studies'.[3]. Instead he founded the software company Infogami, a startup that was funded by Y Combinator's first Summer Founders Program.[4] 

Through the Y Combinator program, Swartz found himself working on the Reddit website. Initially finding it difficult to make money from the project, the site later gained in popularity, with millions of users visiting it each month. In late 2006, after months of negotiations, Reddit was sold to CondéNet, owners of Wired magazine.[3] Swartz moved with his company to San Francisco to work on Wired, but grew unhappy with the set-up[3] and in January, 2007, he was asked to resign from his position.[5] Swartz described himself as being ill and suffering from a constant depressed mood throughout 2007.[6] In September, 2007, Swartz joined with Simon Carstensen and launched Jottit. In 2010-2011 he was a fellow at Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.[7] 

Swartz was also the creator of the web.py web application framework,[8] and co-founded Demand Progress,[7] a progressive advocacy group that organizes people via email and other media for "contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word" about targeted issues.