Until he committed suicide in January at the age of 26, Aaron Swartz saw himself as a freedom fighter of the information age. The charismatic code writer and anti-copyright activist was arrested two years ago for breaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network to download 4.8m articles from the vast subscribers-only academic archive, Jstor. Federal prosecutors threw the book at Swartz, charging him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the vague Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.
今年1月，年僅26歲的亞倫•斯沃茨(Aaron Swartz)自殺身亡。他生前一直自視爲資訊時代的自由鬥士。這位魅力非凡的程式員、反版權人士兩年前被捕，原因是他侵入了麻省理工學院(MIT)的電腦網路，並從僅對註冊用戶開放的大型學術資料庫Jstor下載了480萬篇文章。聯邦檢察官想對他進行嚴懲，控告他犯有兩宗網路詐騙罪，並違反了措辭模糊的《電腦欺詐和濫用法案》（Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ，簡稱CFAA）中的11項規定。