Aaron Swartz, who killed himself on Friday, was a nice-looking young man and very clever with it. He helped to invent a web technology that, when he effectively sold it to the publishers Condé Nast six years ago, made him a millionaire, though barely out of his teens.
Swartz then became a campaigner for free and open access to information on the net. He spent his own money moving US court records from a fee-based website to a free one and was part of the successful alliance that forced the US authorities to drop plans to strengthen copyright laws.
In 2010 and 2011, probably by hacking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer system, he downloaded perhaps the bulk of the millions of academic papers