(14.01.2013)

Aaron Swartz, the 26-year-old computer genius, activist, and technology innovator known as a hero of the open-access movement—which promotes use of the Internet to provide free and easy access to the world’s knowledge—committed suicide last Friday in New York City, according to authorities and various media outlets. He was a Safra fellow studying ethics at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society in July 2011 when a federal grand jury indicted him on charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading five million articles and documents—nearly the entire library, according to Insidehighered.com.