Aaron Swartz

Aaron Swartz (1986–2013) was an American programmer and internet activist who became associated with Reddit in November 2005, when Y Combinator suggested his startup Infogami merge with Reddit; the combined entity gave him the title of co-founder. He helped develop Reddit's codebase but left the company in 2007, the year after its sale to Condé Nast. Swartz went on to influential work on RSS, Markdown, Creative Commons, and progressive online activism, including campaigns against the SOPA bill. In 2011 he was arrested and federally indicted for mass-downloading academic articles from JSTOR via MIT's network; facing multiple felony charges and a possible lengthy prison sentence, he died by suicide on January 11, 2013, prompting widespread debate about prosecutorial overreach and computer-crime law.