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A cofounder of the social, news and entertainment website reddit has been found dead.

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He certainly was a prodigy, although he never kind of thought of himself like that.

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He was totally unexcited

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about starting businesses and making money.

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There's a profound sense of lost in Highland Park,

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Aaron Swartz's hometown,

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as loved ones say good-bye to one of the Internet's brightest lights.

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Freedom, open access and computer activists are mourning his loss.

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"An astonishing intellect", if you talk to people who knew him.

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He was killed by the government

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and MIT betrayed all of its basic principles.

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They wanted to make an example out of him.

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Governments have insatiable desire to control.

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He was potentially facing 35 years in prison and a one million dollar fine.


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Raising questions of prosecutorial zeal, and I would say even misconduct.

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Have you looked into that particular matter and reached any conclusions?

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Growing up, you know, I slowly had this process of realizing

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that all the things around me, that people had told me

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were just the natural way things were, the way things always would be

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They weren't natural at all, there were things that could be changed

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and there were things that more importantly were wrong and should change.

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And once I realized that, there was really kind of no going back.

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The Internet's Own Boy.

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Welcome to story reading time.

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The name of the book is "Paddington at the fair".

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Well, he was born in Highland Park and grew up here.

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Aaron came from a family of three brothers, all extraordinarily bright.

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Oh, the box is tipping over...

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So we were all, you know, not the best behaved children.

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You know, three boys running around all the time, causing trouble.

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Hey, no, no no!

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- Aaron!
- What?

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But I've come to the realization that Aaron learned how to learn at a very young age.

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One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight...

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- Knock, knock!
- Who's there?

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- Aaron.
- Aaron who?

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- Aaron Funnyman.

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He knew what he wanted, and he always wanted to do it.

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He always accomplished what he wanted.

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His curiosity was endless.

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Here's a little picture of what the planets are.

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And each planet has a symbol. Mercury symbol, Venus symbol, Earth symbol, Mars symbol...

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One day he said to Susan: what's this free family entertainment downtown Highland Park?

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He was three at the time.

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She said: what are you talking about?

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He said: Look, it says here on the refrigerator, "Free family entertainment downtown Highland Park".

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She was floored and astonished that he could read.

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It's called "My Family Seder".

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That Seder night is different from all other nights.

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I remember once, we were at the University of Chicago Library.

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I pulled a book off the shelf that was from like 1900.

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And showed to him, and said: you know, this is an extraordinary place.

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We all were curious children, but Aaron really liked learning and really liked teaching.

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And what we're going to learn is ABC backwards.

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Z, Y, X, W, V, U, T...

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I remember he came home from his first Algebra class.

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He was like: Noah, let me teach you Algebra!

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and I'm like: what is Algebra?

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And he was always like that.

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Now let's press click button, there! Now it's got that!

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Now it's in pink!

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When he was about two or three years old, and Bob introduced him to computers,

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then he just took off, like crazy on them.

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(baby talk)

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We all had computers, but Aaron really took to them, really took to the Internet.

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- Working at the computer?
- Naah..

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- How c... mommy, why is nothing working?

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He started programming from a really young age.

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I remember the first program that I wrote with him was in Basic, and it was a Star Wars trivia game.

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He sat down with me in the basement, where the computer was,

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for hours, programming this game.

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The problem that I kept having with him is that there was nothing that I wanted done.

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And to him, there was always something to do, always something that programming could solve.

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The way Aaron always saw it, is that programming is magic.

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You can accomplish these things that normal humans can't.

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Aaron made an ATM, using, like, a MacIntosh and, like, a cardboard box.

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One year for Halloween, I didn't know what I wanted to be,

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and he thought it would be really really cool if I dressed up like his new favorite computer,

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which at the time was the original iMac.

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I mean, he hated dressing up for Halloween but he loved convincing other people

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to dress up in these things that he wanted to see.

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Host Aaron, stop! Guys, come on, look at the camera!

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He made this website called The Info, where people could just fill in information.

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I'm sure someone out there knows everything about gold, gold leafing.

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Why they don't write about that on this website? And then other people can come at a later point

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and read that information, and edit the information if they thought it was bad.

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Not too dissimilar from Wikipedia, right?

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And this was before Wikipedia begun, and this is developed by a 12 year old,

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in his room, by himself, running on this tiny server, using ancient technology.

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One of the teachers response was, like: This is a terrible idea, you cant' just let anyone author the encyclopedia.

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The whole reason we have scholars is to write these books for us. How did you have such a terrible idea?

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Me and my other brother will go, like: Oh, you know, Wikipedia is cool, but we had that in our house, like, five years ago.

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Aaron's website, theinfo.org, wins a school competition

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hosted by the Cambridge-based web design firm ArsDigita.

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We all went to Cambridge when he won the ArsDigita prize

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and we had no clue what Aaron was doing.

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It was obvious that the prize was really important.

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Aaron soon became involved with online programming communities,

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then in the process of shaping a new tool for the web.

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He comes up saying to me, like: Ben, there's this really awesome thing that I'm working on.

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You need to hear about it!

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And I'm like: yeah, what is it?

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And he says: It's a thing called RSS.

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And he explains me what RSS is.

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And I'm like: why is that useful, Aaron? Is any site using it, like why would I want to use it?

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There is this mailing list for people who are working on RSS, and XML more generally.

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And there's a person on it named Aaron Swartz, who is combative but very smart and who had lots of good ideas

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and he'd never come to face-to-face meetings, and they said,

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you know, when are you gonna come to any of these face-to-face meetings?

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And he said: you know, I don't think my mom would let me. I'm.. I've just turned 14.

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So their first reaction was, well, you know, this person, this colleague we'we been working with all year is...

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was 13 years old while we were working with him, and he's only 14 now.

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And their second reaction was: Christ, we really want to meet him! That's extraordinary!

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He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.

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What he was doing was to help build the plumming for modern hypertext.

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The piece that he was working on, RSS, was a tool that you can use to get summaries

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of things that are going on on other web pages.

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Most commonly, you would use this for a blog. You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.

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You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of what's going on on those other pages

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to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.

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Aaron was really young, but he understood the technology and he saw that it was imperfect

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and looked for ways to help make it better.

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So his mom started bundling him on planes in Chicago, we'd pick him up in San Francicso.

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We'd introduce him to interesting people to argue with, and we'd marvle at his horriffic eating habits.

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He only ate white food, only like steamed rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white

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and white bread, and so on...

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And you kind of marvled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,

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what appeared to be a small boy's mouth.

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And you'd think, this is a kid that's really going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.

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Aaron, you're up!

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I think the difference is that now you can't make companies like dotcoms.

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You can't have companies that just sell dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.

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But there's still a lot of innovation going on.

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Think that maybe if you don't see the innovation, maybe your head is in the sand!

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He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's

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sort of like: "I'm smarter than you, and because I'm smarter than you I'm better than you,

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and I can tell you what to do".

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It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.

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So you aggregate all these computers together and now they're solving big problems

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like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

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I first met him on IRC, or Internet Relay Chat.

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He didn't just write code, he also got people excited about solving problems he got.

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He was a connector.

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The free culture movement, he had a lot of this energy.

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I think Aaron was trying to make the world work. He was trying to fix it.

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He had a very kind of strong personality, that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

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It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world

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and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

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Aaron got into high school and he was really just sick of school.

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He didn't like it, he didn't like any of the classes that were being thaught, he didn't like the teachers.

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Aaron really knew how to get information.

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He was like: "I don't need to go to this teacher to learn how to do geometry.

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I can just read the geometry book.

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And I don't need to go to this teacher to learn their version of American history,

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like I have like three historical compilations here, I could just read them.

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And I'm not interested in that, I'm interested in the web".

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I was very frustrated with school, I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about.

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They were domineering and controlling, the homework was kind of a sham

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and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busy work.

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And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education

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and how this educational system was developed.

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Then, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things

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as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them.

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And that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,

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I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,

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I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

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One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days.

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Copyright has always been something kind of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers,

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but it wasn't an eccessive burden, it was a reasonable institution to have in place,

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to make sure that people got paid.

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What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system

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and this amazing new thing we were trying to build, the Internet and the Web.

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These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

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He then met Harvard's Law professor Lawrence Lessig,

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who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.

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The young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.

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I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the LD, to see the LD document.

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Why did you fly out here from Chicago and come all this way to see the LD argument?

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That's a more difficult question...

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I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court,

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especially in such a prestigious case as this one.

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Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet.

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It was called Creative Commons.

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So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people, creators,

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a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry.

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So if copyright is all about "All rights reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some rights reserved" model.

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I want a simple way to say to you: here is what you can do with my work,

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even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do.

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And Aaron's role was the computer part.

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Like how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable

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and expressed in a way so that machines can process it.

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And people were like: why do you have this 15 years old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons?

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Don't you think that's a huge mistake?

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And they're like: the biggest mistake we would have is not listening to this kid.

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He barely is not even tall enough to even get over the podium.

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And it was this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing,

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where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face.

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When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose license",

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it gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you got three simple questions:

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Do you want to require attribution?

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Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?

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Do you want to allow modifications of your work?

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I was floored, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult.

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And Aaron stood up there in fromt of a whole audience full of people and just started talking

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about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons.

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And they were all listening to him. Just...

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I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?

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But they did...

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Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.

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Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work,

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the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

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Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.

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He contributed through his technical abilities, and yet it was not simply a technical matter to him.

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Aaron often wrote candidly in his personal blog:

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I think deeply about things, and I want others to do likewise.

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I work for ideas and learn from people. I don't like excluding people.

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I'm a perfectionist, but I won't let that get in the way of publication.

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Except for education and entertainment, I'm not going to waste my time

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on things that won't have an impact.

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I try to be friends with everyone, but I hate it when you don't take me seriously.

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I don't hold grudges, it's not productive, but I learn from my experience.

227
00:16:32,086 --> 00:16:37,526
I want to make the world a better place.

228
00:16:41,102 --> 00:16:46,292
In 2004 Swartz leaves Highland Park and enrolls in Stanford University.

229
00:16:46,396 --> 00:16:52,486
He'd had all enterocolitis, which was very troubling and we were concerned about him taking his medication.

230
00:16:52,740 --> 00:16:57,223
He got hospitalized and he would take this cocktail of pills every day.

231
00:16:57,223 --> 00:17:01,093
And one of these pills was a steroid which daunted his growth,

232
00:17:01,093 --> 00:17:04,782
and made him feel different from any of the other students.

233
00:17:04,782 --> 00:17:07,828
Aaron, I think, shows up at Stanford ready to do scholarship

234
00:17:07,828 --> 00:17:12,801
and finds himself in effectively a baby-sitting program for overachieving high-schoolers

235
00:17:12,801 --> 00:17:20,828
who in four years are meant to become captains of industry and 1%'ers

236
00:17:20,828 --> 00:17:25,578
and I think it just made him bananas.

237
00:17:26,077 --> 00:17:29,197
In 2005, after only one year of college,

238
00:17:29,197 --> 00:17:35,874
Schwartz was offered a spot at a new start-up incubation firm called Y Combinator, lead by Paul Graham.

239
00:17:36,431 --> 00:17:39,777
He's like: hey, I have this idea for a a website!

240
00:17:39,851 --> 00:17:43,170
And Paul Graham likes him enough, and says: yeah, sure!

241
00:17:43,170 --> 00:17:46,650
Suddenly he drops out of school, moves to this appartment...

242
00:17:46,668 --> 00:17:49,604
So this used to be Aaron's appartment when he moved here.

243
00:17:49,604 --> 00:17:55,397
I have vague memories of my father telling me how difficult it was to get a lease

244
00:17:55,397 --> 00:17:58,737
'cause Aaron had no credit and he dropped out of college.

245
00:17:58,742 --> 00:18:04,989
Aaron lived in what's now the living-room and some of the posters are leftovers from when Aaron lived here.

246
00:18:04,989 --> 00:18:09,889
And the library... there are more books, but a lot of them are Aaron's.

247
00:18:11,551 --> 00:18:17,511
Aaron's Y Combinator site was called infogami, a tool to build websites.

248
00:18:17,511 --> 00:18:21,098
But infogami struggles to find users, and Swartz eventually

249
00:18:21,098 --> 00:18:25,037
merges his company with another Y Combinator project in need of help.

250
00:18:25,037 --> 00:18:29,919
It was a project headed by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, called reddit.

251
00:18:29,919 --> 00:18:34,488
That we were, starting from almost nothing. No users, no money, no code,

252
00:18:34,488 --> 00:18:37,657
and growing day by day into a hugely popular website.

253
00:18:37,657 --> 00:18:39,846
And it showed no signs of letting up,

254
00:18:39,846 --> 00:18:44,373
first we had 1000 users, then 10000, then 20000 and on, and on... It was just incredible...

255
00:18:44,373 --> 00:18:49,563
reddit becomes huge and it's a real sort of geeky corner of the Internet.

256
00:18:52,642 --> 00:19:01,220
There's a lot of humor, there's a lot of art, and there's just people who flocked to the site

257
00:19:01,220 --> 00:19:07,883
and made that site the main site they go to every morning to get their news.

258
00:19:07,883 --> 00:19:12,008
reddit kind of just borders on chaos at some levels,

259
00:19:12,008 --> 00:19:19,368
so on the one hand it's a place where people discuss news of the day, technology, politics and issues,

260
00:19:19,368 --> 00:19:24,824
and yet there is a lot of kind of Not Safe For Work material, offensive material,

261
00:19:24,824 --> 00:19:29,716
there are some sub-reddits where trolls find a welcome home

262
00:19:29,716 --> 00:19:33,929
and so, in that sense reddit has been kind of home to controversy as well.

263
00:19:33,929 --> 00:19:36,791
It kind of sits on that edge of chaos.

264
00:19:36,791 --> 00:19:41,081
reddit catches the attention of the corporate magazine giant Conde Nast,

265
00:19:41,081 --> 00:19:42,938
who makes an offer to buy the company.

266
00:19:42,938 --> 00:19:46,939
Some large amount of money, large enough that my dad was getting bugged with questions

267
00:19:46,939 --> 00:19:51,079
about like: "How do I store this money?"

268
00:19:51,302 --> 00:19:54,272
- Like a lot of money...
- Like a lot of money.

269
00:19:54,272 --> 00:20:00,319
Like probably more than a million dollars, but I don't actually know.

270
00:20:00,319 --> 00:20:03,461
- And he's how old at the time?
- 19 - 20...

271
00:20:05,165 --> 00:20:11,205
So it was in this apartment, they sat around 
on what predated these couches

272
00:20:11,205 --> 00:20:14,675
hacking on reddit, and when they sold reddit

273
00:20:14,757 --> 00:20:18,641
they threw a giant party, and then all flew
out to California the next day

274
00:20:18,641 --> 00:20:20,355
and left the keys with me.

275
00:20:24,261 --> 00:20:28,629
It was funny, you know, he'd just sold his start up so we all presumed 
he was the richest person around

276
00:20:28,629 --> 00:20:33,920
but he said "Oh no, I'll take this tiny little
shoe-box sized room that's all I need."

277
00:20:33,920 --> 00:20:36,146
It was barely larger than a closet.

278
00:20:36,146 --> 00:20:42,499
The idea of him spending his money on
fancy objects just seemed implausible.

279
00:20:42,580 --> 00:20:45,960
He explains it as "I like living in 
apartments so I'm not going to spend money on

280
00:20:45,960 --> 00:20:47,988
a new place to live, I'm not going to buy a
mansion. And I like wearing jeans 


281
00:20:50,016 --> 00:20:52,046
and a t-shirt, so I'm not going to spend 
any more money on clothes.


282
00:20:52,046 --> 00:20:54,076
So it's really no big deal."

283
00:20:54,076 --> 00:20:57,966
What is a big deal to Swartz is how traffic 
flows on the internet.

284
00:20:58,140 --> 00:21:00,680
And what commands our attention.

285
00:21:00,844 --> 00:21:04,252
In the old system of broadcasting, you're
fundamentally limited by the amount of

286
00:21:04,252 --> 00:21:08,583
space in the airwaves. You can only send out
ten channels over the airwaves, TV.

287
00:21:08,583 --> 00:21:10,915
Or even with cable, you had 500 channels.

288
00:21:11,003 --> 00:21:15,593
On the Internet, everybody can have a channel. 
Everyone can get a blog, or a Myspace page.

289
00:21:15,690 --> 00:21:18,274
Everyone has a way of expressing themselves. 


290
00:21:18,274 --> 00:21:21,280
What you see now isn't a question of who gets
access to the airwaves,

291
00:21:21,280 --> 00:21:25,330
it's a question of who gets control over the 
ways you find people.

292
00:21:25,330 --> 00:21:29,286
You start seeing power centralising in sites 
like Google, they are sort of gate-keepers that tell you

293
00:21:29,286 --> 00:21:30,993
where on the internet you want to go.

294
00:21:30,993 --> 00:21:34,273
The people who provide you your sources
of news and information.

295
00:21:34,273 --> 00:21:38,314
So it's not only certain people have 
a licence to speak, now everyone has

296
00:21:38,314 --> 00:21:40,904
a licence to speak. It's a question of
who gets heard.

297
00:21:45,196 --> 00:21:49,806
After he started working in San Francisco 
at Condé Nast he comes into the office

298
00:21:49,806 --> 00:21:53,792
And they want to give him a computer with all
this crap installed on it.

299
00:21:53,792 --> 00:21:57,273
And say he can't install any new things 
on his computer.

300
00:21:57,273 --> 00:21:59,375
Which to developers is outrageous.

301
00:21:59,375 --> 00:22:02,095
From the first day he was complaining
about all the stuff.

302
00:22:05,317 --> 00:22:11,147
"Gray walls, gray desks, gray noise. The first
day I showed up here I simply couldn't take it.

303
00:22:11,147 --> 00:22:15,483
By lunchtime I had literally locked myself 
in a bathroom stall and started crying.

304
00:22:15,483 --> 00:22:18,285
I can't imagine staying sane with someone
buzzing in my ear all day


305
00:22:18,285 --> 00:22:21,575
Let alone getting any actual work done. 


306
00:22:21,575 --> 00:22:24,087
Nobody else seems to get work done either

307
00:22:24,087 --> 00:22:27,587
Everybody's always coming into our room to 
hang out and chat, or invite us to play 



308
00:22:27,587 --> 00:22:29,957
the new video game system that Wired is testing."

309
00:22:32,972 --> 00:22:39,562
He really had different aspirations that were
politically oriented. And Silicon Valley just

310
00:22:39,667 --> 00:22:47,442
doesn't really quite have that culture that orients
technical activity for the purposes of political goals.

311
00:22:47,544 --> 00:22:49,613
Aaron hated working for a corporation.

312
00:22:49,613 --> 00:22:53,673
They all hate working for Condé Nast, but Aaron
is the only one who is not going to take it.

313
00:22:53,694 --> 00:22:55,884
And Aaron basically gets himself fired.

314
00:22:55,903 --> 00:22:58,313
By not showing up to work, ever.

315
00:23:01,183 --> 00:23:05,434
It was set to be a messy break-up. 
Both Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman

316
00:23:05,447 --> 00:23:08,277
declined to be interviewed for this film.

317
00:23:09,251 --> 00:23:15,891
He rejected the business world. One of the 
really important things to remember about


318
00:23:15,891 --> 00:23:22,664
that choice when Aaron decided to leave start-up
culture is that he was also leaving behind

319
00:23:22,664 --> 00:23:31,334
the things that had made him famous and well-loved.
He was at risk of letting down fans.

320
00:23:31,422 --> 00:23:34,176
He got to where he was supposed to be going, 
and had the self-awareness

321
00:23:34,176 --> 00:23:43,051
and the self-awareness and the orneriness to realize
that he had climbed the mountain of shit to pluck

322
00:23:43,051 --> 00:23:45,849
the single rose and discovered that he'd lost 
his sense of smell.

323
00:23:45,849 --> 00:23:50,399
And rather than sit there and insist that it 
wasn't as bad as it seemed,

324
00:23:50,399 --> 00:23:53,693
and he did get the rose in any event.

325
00:23:53,693 --> 00:23:57,413
He climbed back down again. Which is pretty cool.

326
00:23:58,026 --> 00:24:01,728
The way Aaron always saw it is that 
programming is magic.

327
00:24:01,728 --> 00:24:07,110
You can accomplish these things that normal
humans can't by being able to program.

328
00:24:07,110 --> 00:24:13,310
So if you had magical powers, would you use 
them for good, or to make you mountains of cash?

329
00:24:15,009 --> 00:24:18,478
Swartz was inspired by one of the visionaries
he had met as a child.

330
00:24:18,478 --> 00:24:22,387
The man who had invented the World Wide Web,
Tim Berners-Lee.

331
00:24:22,387 --> 00:24:25,938
In the 1990s, Berners-Lee was arguably sitting on

332
00:24:25,938 --> 00:24:29,260
one of the most lucrative inventions of 
the 20th century. 


333
00:24:29,260 --> 00:24:36,067
But instead of profiting from the invention 
of the World Wide Web he gave it away for free.

334
00:24:36,067 --> 00:24:39,707
It is the only reason the Worl WIde Web exists today.

335
00:24:41,118 --> 00:24:45,261
Aaron is certainly deeply influenced by TIm. 


336
00:24:45,261 --> 00:24:50,928
Tim is certainly a very prominent early
internet genius, who doesn't in any sense


337
00:24:50,928 --> 00:24:55,865
cash out. He's not at all interested in how he's
going to figure out how to make a billion dollars.

338
00:24:55,865 --> 00:24:57,829
People were saying, ah there's money to be made there,

339
00:24:57,829 --> 00:25:00,636
so there would have been lots of little webs.

340
00:25:00,636 --> 00:25:02,139
Instead of one big one.

341
00:25:02,139 --> 00:25:05,980
And one little web, all sorts of webs, doesn't 
work. Because you can't follow links

342
00:25:05,980 --> 00:25:08,280
from one to the other.

343
00:25:10,173 --> 00:25:14,112
You had to have the critical masses, the 
thing was the entire planet, so

344
00:25:14,112 --> 00:25:16,902
it's not going to work unless the whole planet
can get on board.

345
00:25:24,141 --> 00:25:29,232
I feel very strongly that it's not enough to
live in the world as it is, to just take

346
00:25:29,232 --> 00:25:34,732
what you're given and follow the things that
adults told you to do, and that your parents

347
00:25:34,732 --> 00:25:39,032
told you to do, and that society tells you to do. 
I think you should always be questioning.

348
00:25:39,045 --> 00:25:43,405
I take this very scientific attitude, that 
everything you've learned is just provisional,

349
00:25:43,405 --> 00:25:49,267
it's always open to recantation or refutation or 
questioning. And I think the same applies to society.

350
00:25:49,267 --> 00:25:54,041
Once I realised that there were real serious problems, 
fundamental problems that I could do something

351
00:25:54,041 --> 00:25:58,421
to address, I didn't see a way to forget that,
I didn't see a way not to.

352
00:26:02,600 --> 00:26:04,831
We just started spending a lot of time,


353
00:26:04,831 --> 00:26:06,621
just kind of as friends.

354
00:26:08,912 --> 00:26:11,884
We would just talk for hours, into the night.

355
00:26:14,393 --> 00:26:18,110
I definitely should have understood that he was
flirting with me. I think to some degree


356
00:26:18,110 --> 00:26:23,980
I was like, this is a terrible idea, and impossible, 
and qtherefore I will pretend it is not happening.

357
00:26:25,161 --> 00:26:28,937
As my marriage was breaking down and I was
really stuck without anywhere to go, 


358
00:26:28,937 --> 00:26:32,927
We became roommates. And I brought my daughter over.

359
00:26:34,081 --> 00:26:37,246
We moved in and furnished the house, and it 
was really peaceful.

360
00:26:37,246 --> 00:26:40,816
My life had not been peaceful for a while, and
really neither had his.

361
00:26:46,505 --> 00:26:55,083
We were extremely close from the beginning
of our romantic relationship.

362
00:26:55,083 --> 00:26:57,633
We were in constant contact.

363
00:26:57,633 --> 00:27:02,432
But we're both really difficult people to deal with.

364
00:27:04,495 --> 00:27:12,345
In a very Ally McBeal discussion he confessed he
had a theme song, and I made him play it for me.

365
00:27:12,345 --> 00:27:16,504
It was Extraordinary Machine, by Fiona Apple.

366
00:27:16,504 --> 00:27:25,134
I think it was just that sense of being a little
bit embattled that the song has. 


367
00:27:25,134 --> 00:27:27,837
And it also had this hopefulness to it.


368
00:27:27,837 --> 00:27:34,418
♪ By foot it's a slow climb. But I'm good
at being uncomfortable so I can't stop...

369
00:27:34,418 --> 00:27:36,689
changing all the time ♪

370
00:27:36,689 --> 00:27:44,481
In many ways, Aaron was tremendously optimistic
about life. Even when he didn't feel it, 


371
00:27:44,481 --> 00:27:47,041
he could be tremendously optimistic about life.

372
00:27:47,041 --> 00:27:49,561
♪ Extraordinary machine ♪

373
00:27:53,237 --> 00:27:58,317
- What are you doing?
(Quinn) - Flicker has video now.

374
00:27:59,730 --> 00:28:01,743
Swartz threw his energy into a string of new

375
00:28:01,743 --> 00:28:04,731
projects involving access to public information.

376
00:28:04,731 --> 00:28:08,189
Including an accountability webside called
Watchdog.net

377
00:28:08,189 --> 00:28:10,799
And a project called The Open Library.

378
00:28:10,986 --> 00:28:15,299
So the open library project is a website
you can visit at openlibrary.org

379
00:28:15,299 --> 00:28:19,778
And the idea is to be a huge wiki, an 
editable website with one page per book.

380
00:28:19,778 --> 00:28:23,910
So for every book ever published we want
to have a webpage about it that combines

381
00:28:23,910 --> 00:28:29,551
all the information from publishers, from
booksellers, from libraries, from readers


382
00:28:29,551 --> 00:28:34,587
onto one site. And then gives you links where
you can buy it, borrow it, or browse it.

383
00:28:34,587 --> 00:28:39,958
I love libraries. I'm the kind of person who 
goes to a new city and immediately seeks out the library

384
00:28:39,958 --> 00:28:44,050
That's the dream of Open Library, 
is building this website where both you can leap

385
00:28:44,050 --> 00:28:49,297
from book to book, from person to author, 
from subject to idea. Go through this vast tree

386
00:28:49,297 --> 00:28:53,957
of knowledge that's been embedded and lost 
in big physical libraries. That's hard to find,

387
00:28:53,957 --> 00:28:59,086
it's not very well accessible online. It's really 
important because books are our cultural legacy.

388
00:28:59,086 --> 00:29:01,283
Books are the place people go to write things down.

389
00:29:01,283 --> 00:29:05,813
And to have all that swallowed up by one
corporation is kind of scary.

390
00:29:06,730 --> 00:29:10,771
How can you bring public access to 
the public domain?

391
00:29:10,771 --> 00:29:14,828
It may sound obvious that you'd have public
access to the public domain, but 


392
00:29:14,828 --> 00:29:21,368
in fact it's not true. So the public domain 
should be free to all. But it's often locked up.


393
00:29:21,378 --> 00:29:26,756
There's often guard cages. It's like having
a national park but with a moat around it,

394
00:29:26,756 --> 00:29:33,245
and gun turrets pointed out, in case somebody
may want to come and enjoy the public domain.

395
00:29:33,245 --> 00:29:39,458
One of the things Aaron was particularly interested in
was bringing public access to the public domain.

396
00:29:39,458 --> 00:29:42,288
This is one of the things that got him 
into so much trouble.

397
00:29:46,254 --> 00:29:52,794
I had been trying to get access to federal
court records in the United States.

398
00:29:54,458 --> 00:29:59,818
What I discovered was a puzzling system, 
called Pacer. Which stands for


399
00:29:59,818 --> 00:30:03,124
Public Access to Court Electronic Records.

400
00:30:03,124 --> 00:30:07,314
I started Googling, and that's when I ran
across Carl Malamud.

401
00:30:08,886 --> 00:30:14,997
Access to legal materials in the U.S. is a
$10 billion per year business.

402
00:30:14,997 --> 00:30:23,004
Pacer is just this incredible abomination
of government services. It's 10 cents a page, it's this

403
00:30:23,004 --> 00:30:27,471
most braindead code you've ever seen. You 
can't search it, you can't bookmark anything. 


404
00:30:27,471 --> 00:30:31,891
You've got to have a credit card.
And these are public records.

405
00:30:31,891 --> 00:30:37,429
U.S. district courts are very important, it's
where a lot of our seminal litigation starts.

406
00:30:37,429 --> 00:30:44,369
Civil rights cases, patent cases, all sorts of stuff. Journalists,
students, citizens and lawyers all need

407
00:30:44,369 --> 00:30:50,067
access to Pacer and it fights them every 
step of the way. People without means 


408
00:30:50,067 --> 00:30:55,246
can't see the law as readily as people
that have that gold American Express card. 


409
00:30:55,246 --> 00:30:58,376
It's a poll tax on access to justice.

410
00:30:58,376 --> 00:31:03,236
You know the law is the operating system of our democracy and you have to pay to see it?

411
00:31:08,505 --> 00:31:10,945
You know, that's not much of a democracy.

412
00:31:10,945 --> 00:31:18,045
They make about 120 million dollars a year on the Pacer system and it doesn't cost anything near that, according to their own records.

413
00:31:19,163 --> 00:31:20,576
In fact, it's illegal.

414
00:31:20,576 --> 00:31:31,946
The E-government Act of 2002 states that the courts may charge only to the extent necessary, in order to reimburse the costs of running Pacer.

415
00:31:32,104 --> 00:31:39,900
As the founder of Public.Resource.Org, Malamud wanted to protest the Pacer charges.

416
00:31:39,910 --> 00:31:43,220
He started a program called the Pacer Recycling Project,

417
00:31:43,280 --> 00:31:50,934
where people could upload Pacer documents that they already paid for to a free database so others could use them.

418
00:31:51,042 --> 00:31:56,821
The Pacer people were getting a lot of flack from Congress and others about public access,

419
00:31:57,086 --> 00:32:02,975
and so they put togheter a system in 17 libraries across the country that was free Pacer access.

420
00:32:02,975 --> 00:32:09,125
You know, that's one library every 22,000 square miles, I believe, so it wasn't like pretty convenient.

421
00:32:09,125 --> 00:32:13,353
I encouraged volunteers to join the so-called Thumb Drive Court,

422
00:32:13,353 --> 00:32:18,400
and download docs from the public access libraries, upload them to the Pacer recycling site.

423
00:32:18,457 --> 00:32:24,798
People take a thumb drive to one of these libraries and they downloaded a bunch of documents and they sent it to me.

424
00:32:24,899 --> 00:32:26,549
I mean, it was just a joke.

425
00:32:26,549 --> 00:32:31,209
In fact, when you clicked on Thumb Drive Court, there was a Wizard of Oz [movie clip],

426
00:32:50,314 --> 00:32:53,544
you know, the Munchkin singing, so a videoclip came up:

427
00:32:53,624 --> 00:32:55,664
♪ We represent the lollipop guild. ♪

428
00:32:55,814 --> 00:32:59,724
But of course I get this phone calls from Steve Shultz and Aaron, saying:

429
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Gee, we'd like to join the Thumb Drive Court.

430
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Around that time I ran into Aaron at a conference.

431
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
This really is something that has to be a collaboration between a lot of different people.,

432
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
So I approached him and said:

433
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Hey, I am thinking about an intervention about the Pacer problem.

434
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Schultz had already developed a program that could automatically download Pacer documents from the trial libraries.

435
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999
Swartz wanted to take a look.

436
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So, I showed him the code and I didn't know what would come next,

437
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but as it turns out, over the course of the next few hours at that conference,

438
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he was off sitting in a corner, improving my code, recruiting a friend of his

439
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that lived near one of these libraries to go into the library and to begin to test his improved code,

440
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at which point the folks at the courts realized something is not going quite according to plan.

441
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And data started to come in, and come in, and come in and soon there was 760 GB of Pacer docs about 20 million in pages.

442
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Using information retrieved from the trial libraries, Swartz was conducting mass automated parallel downloading of the Pacer system.

443
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He was able to acquire nearly 2.7 million Federal Court documents, almost

444
99:59:59,999 --> 99:59:59,999


445
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446
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