The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet

Aaron Swartz was a social outcast who thought information should be freely available. He was especially concerned with government and scholarly information. Why should companies get rich off data that the public had helped fund. He attempted to download scholarly articles from the MIT network. This resulted in the crashing of Jstor servers. The police came in and threw the book at him for "stealing" the data. He committed suicide rather than face the charges. 

Swartz grew up in a well to do family in the suburbs of Chicago. He preferred interacting with people through computers. He did not like the structure of school, and left high school to learn on his own. He later enrolled at Stanford, but was disillusioned there also. He was credited as a cofounder of Reddit and cashed out well there. He also started early free encyclopedias and participated in other "free information" projects. Swartz seemed to benefit greatly from the openness the well-to-do status of his parents in early life. Without the freedom to explore on his own, he would have not had the opportunities to pursue his passions. 

The book spends a great deal of time covering the history of copyright. The United States was late in the copyright game. However, it has been willing to play catch up. Alas, the corporations that benefit from long copyrights are able to mobilize much better than the public that benefits from having more things in the public domain. Thus, laws like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act have passed extended copyrights well beyond the life of the author. (The justification that this ultra-long-term encourages creativity is very far fetched.) Do we have hope of rationalizing copyright? Or will it keep going in the extension direction?