The Internet’s Own Boy, A Documentary About Aaron Swartz Directed by Brian Knappenberger

Brian Knappenberger, director of Anonymous documentary We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists, has launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a documentary about Aaron Swartz currently titled The Internet’s Own Boy.

[The film] follows internet activist and programming pioneer Aaron Swartz from his teenage emergence on the internet scene and involvement in RSS and Reddit, to his increased interest in political advocacy and the controversial actions he allegedly took in downloading nearly four million academic articles from the online service JSTOR. The film explores Aaron’s arrest, the prosecution’s tactics in bringing the case to trial through the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the CFAA, and the impact a seemingly small hacking gesture had on Aaron’s life and the future of information access on the internet.

Knappenberger plans to interview Swartz’s family, loved ones, and officials involved in the JSTOR case for the documentary. “I feel a real responsibility – his story has touched so many people that I feel like I really want to this justice” Knappenberger said in an interview with Wired. “It’s not a memorial of him, either. It’s an investigative approach into what happened and who he was.”

via Wired