Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger on New Aaron Swartz Documentary The Internet's Own Boy

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Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger on New Aaron Swartz Documentary The Internet's Own Boy

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"Aaron [Swartz] was on the edge, he was ahead of everybody else and that's just not a comfortable place to be," says Brian Knappenberger, a documentary filmmaker who is behind a new film about Swartz's life called The Internet's Own Boy. Reason TV sat down with Knappenberger to talk about the film and a few of Swartz's ideas about freedom in the age of the Internet.

Swartz was a programming prodigy who helped create RSS and Creative Commons, and he co-founded Reddit. After selling Reddit to Condé Nast, Swartz turned his attention to political organizing, becoming a popular Internet activist who tried to bring attention to progressive causes and freedom on the web. In 2012, he helped bring attention to censorship issues in the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill, a protest that culminated with top websites like Google, Wikipedia and Reddit blacking out their pages.

"He had a set of skills that he could put in the service of the public good and he didn't see a reason that if he had those skills that he shouldn't do that," says Knappenberger.

In 2013, Swartz took his own life after the U.S. Department of Justice charged him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act a few years prior for illegally downloading millions of academic research articles from JSTOR, a nonprofit company that sells such materials. The charges carried a maximum penalty of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison.

"And this is research that is paid for by taxpayers or research that was already in the public domain," says Knappenberg, who says the Justice Department may have tried to make an example of Swartz. "Honestly, the vast majority of things that Aaron was doing seemed to be political organizing, so what were they trying to deter?"

Knappenberger was the producer and director of the 2012 documentary We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists and has produced documentaries for Bloomberg, Frontline, and PBS. The Internet's Own Boy is available for download and is in selected theaters June 27, 2014.

Produced by Paul Detrick. Shot by Zach Weissmuller and Will Neff. Music by Podington Bear.

About 8:00 minutes.

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Comments

[110 Lean]

Why does Reason continue to deify this dead loser?

[Acosmist]

Fucking this.

[Mark22]

Swartz have a point that government funded research publications should probably be available free, but his way of advocating that point was just stupid.

And, as far as I can tell, that was the extent of his advocacy for "freedom"; otherwise, he seemed like a typical wealthy and privileged progressive, advocating restricting other people's liberties and taking away their money to make himself appears benevolent towards those less fortunate.

[wwhorton]

Where's all the hate for Swartz coming from? Genuine question.

As far as I can tell he was a little bit of a nutty Progressive, as many 20-somethings are, and he didn't have a coherent ideology as much as a collection of sometimes conflicting beliefs and values--again, as many 20-somethings (and older) do. He protested SOPA, which makes him OK in my book, because that was a terrible piece of legislation. And I say that as someone who supports the idea of IP and thinks copyright is a legitimate legal tool for creators to protect their work.

I mean, he was a starry-eyed Progressive who both did at least one good thing for liberty AND was ironically pressured into suicide by the very politicians he supported. How is this NOT a recurring feature on Reason?