There's A New Documentary On The Tragic Story Of Reddit Co-founder Aaron Swartz
The 26-year-old killed himself in New York City on January 11, 2013, a year ago Saturday.
The movie was funded in part by a Kickstarter campaign, raising over $93,000.
Swartz's life story is amazing and heartbreaking.
He was an Internet activist that helped found news-sharing site Reddit.
The movie delves into how he organized the tech industry to fight a bill in Congress called SOPA. SOPA was supposed to stop people from sharing copyrighted material online illegally, but Internet advocates like Swartz feared that it gave the government too much power to shut down websites.
Separate from SOPA, Swartz was embroiled in a legal battle in which a prosecutor was threatening him with decades in prison for downloading millions of documents from an online site called JSTOR. JSTOR hosts journals of academic research.
Harvard law professor and activist Lawrence Lessig said Swartz was shamefully bullied by the government in JSTOR case.
Swartz died five months before Edward Snowden would begin leaking documents about government surveillance, sparking an international debate.
The new trailer is intended to drum up support for a day of activism to fight government surveillance, using some of the same tactics the anti-SOPA folks used to stop that bill.
February 11 has been dubbed The Day We Fight Back Against Mass Surveillance. It's asking people to post protest signs on websites and on Facebook and do other things to ask the government to knock it off.
Here's the trailer of the Swartz movie.
- A centenarian who starts her day with gentle exercise and loves walks shares 5 longevity tips, including staying single
- A couple accidentally shipped their cat in an Amazon return package. It arrived safely 6 days later, hundreds of miles away.
- FSSAI in process of collecting pan-India samples of Nestle's Cerelac baby cereals: CEO
- Private Equity Investments
- Having an regional accent can be bad for your interviews, especially an Indian one: study
- Dirty laundry? Major clothing companies like Zara and H&M under scrutiny for allegedly fuelling deforestation in Brazil
- 5 Best places to visit near Darjeeling
- Climate change could become main driver of biodiversity decline by mid-century: Study