Many on this list are probably aware of Aaron Swartz due to his investigation 
(some have described it as hounding) after his unauthorised installation of a 
computer in a network system cupboard at MIT through which he downloaded a 
substantial number of papers from JSTOR (which he explained he desired to use 
for text mining and could not access that size of corpus any other way).

He was very well known in the wider free culture, free software and digital 
rights communities as a brilliant dedicated campaigner and developer, in 
particular being a major campaigner against the PIPA/SOPA bills in the US 
Congress recently.

He committed suicide on 11th January (he had suffered from depression).

There are various obituaries and dedications to his memory online. Here are a 
few:

http://laboratorium.net/archive/2013/01/12/aaron_swartz_was_26

http://lessig.tumblr.com/post/40347463044/prosecutor-as-bully

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/01/farewell-aaron-swartz

http://boingboing.net/2013/01/12/rip-aaron-swartz.html

-- 
Professor Andrew A Adams                      a...@meiji.ac.jp
Professor at Graduate School of Business Administration,  and
Deputy Director of the Centre for Business Information Ethics
Meiji University, Tokyo, Japan       http://www.a-cubed.info/


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