The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #2

That's extraordinary!"

He was part of the committee that drafted RSS.

What he was doing was to help build

the plumbing for modern hypertext.

The piece that he was working on, RSS,

was a tool that you can use to get summaries

of things that are going on on other web pages.

Most commonly, you would use this for a blog.

You might have 10 or 20 people's blogs you wanna read.

You use their RSS feeds, these summaries of

what's going on on those other pages

to create a unified list of all the stuff that's going on.

Aaron was really young, but he understood

the technology and he saw that it was imperfect

and looked for ways to help make it better.

So his mom started bundling him on planes

in Chicago. We'd pick him up in San Francicso.

We'd introduce him to interesting people

to argue with, and we'd marvel at his horrific eating habits.

He only ate white food, only like steamed

rice and not fried rice 'cause that wasn't sufficiently white

and white bread, and so on...

and you kind of marveled at the quality of the debate emerging from this,

what appeared to be a small boy's mouth,

and you'd think, this is a kid that's really

going to get somewhere if he doesn't die of scurvy.

Aaron, you're up!

I think the difference is that now you

can't make companies like dotcoms.

You can't have companies that just sell

dog food over the Internet, or sell dog food over cell phones.

But there's still a lot of innovation going on.

I think that maybe if you don't see the

innovation, maybe your head is in the sand.

He takes on this, like an alpha nerd personality, where he's

sort of like, "I'm smarter than you, and

because I'm smarter than you, I'm better than you,

and I can tell you what to do."

It's an extension of, like, him being kind of like a twerp.

So you aggregate all these computers together

and now they're solving big problems

like searching for aliens and trying to cure cancer.

I first met him on IRC, on Internet Relay Chat.

He didn't just write code, he also got people

excited about solving problems he got.

He was a connector.

The free culture movement has had a lot of his energy.

I think Aaron was trying to make the

world work. He was trying to fix it.

He had a very kind of strong personality that definitely ruffled feathers at times.

It wasn't necesarily the case that he was always comfortable in the world

and the world wasn't always comfortable with him.

Aaron got into high school and was really just sick of school.

He didn't like it. He didn't like any of the classes

that were being taught. He didn't like the teachers.

Aaron really knew how to get information.

He was like, "I don't need to go to this

teacher to learn how to do geometry.

I can just read the geometry book,

and I don't need to go to this teacher to

learn their version of American history,

I have, like, three historical compilations here, I could just read them,

and I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the Web."

I was very frustrated with school. I thought the teachers didn't know what they were talking about,

and they were domineering and controlling, and the homework was kind of a sham,

and it was all just like all about a way to pen students all together and force them to do busywork.

And, you know, I started reading books about the history of education

and how this educational system was developed,

and, you know, alternatives to it and ways that people could actually learn things

as opposed to just regurgitating facts that teachers told them,

and that kind of led me down this path of questioning things, once I questioned the school I was in,

I questioned the society that built the school, I questioned the businesses that the schools were training people for,

I questioned the government that set up this whole structure.

One of the thing he was most passionate about was copyright, especially in those early days.

Copyright has always been something of a burden on the publishing industry and on readers,

but it wasn't an excessive burden. It was a reasonable institution to have in place

to make sure that people got paid.

What Aaron's generation experienced was the collision between this antique copyright system

and this amazing new thing we were trying to build--the Internet and the Web.

These things collided, and what we got was chaos.

He then met Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig,

who was then challenging copyright law in the Supreme Court.

A young Aaron Swartz flew to Washington to listen to the Supreme Court hearings.

I am Aaron Swartz and I'm here to listen to the Eldred--to see the Eldred document.

Why did you fly out here from Chicago, and come all this way to see the Eldred argument?

That's a more difficult question...

I don't know. It's very exciting to see the Supreme Court,

especially in such a prestigious case as this one.

Lessig was also moving forward with a new way to define copyright on the Internet.

It was called Creative Commons.

So the simple idea of Creative Commons is to give people--creators--

a simple way to mark their creativity with the freedoms they intended to carry.

So if copyright is all about "All Rights Reserved", then this is a kind of a "Some Rights Reserved" model.

I want a simple way to say to you, "Here's what you can do with my work,

even if there are other things which you need to get my permission before you could do."

And Aaron's role was the computer part.

Like, how do you architect the licenses so they'll be simple and understandable

and expressed in a way so that machines can process it?

And people were like, "Why do you have this fifteen-year-old kid writing the specifications for Creative Commons?

Don't you think that's a huge mistake?"

And Larry is like, "The biggest mistake we would have done is not listening to this kid."

He barely is not even tall enough to even get over the podium,

and it was this movable podium so it was this embarrassing thing,

where once he put his screen up nobody could see his face.

When you come to our website here, and you go to "Choose License".

It gives you this list of options, it explains what it means, and you've got three simple questions:

"Do you want to require attribution?"

"Do you want to allow commercial uses of your work?"

"Do you want to allow modifications of your work?"

I was floored, just completely flabbergasted that these adults regarded him as an adult,

and Aaron stood up there in front of a whole audience full of people, and just started talking

about the platform that he'd created for Creative Commons,

and they were all listening to him, just...

I was sitting at the back, thinking: he's just a kid, why are they listening to him?

But they did...

Well, I don't think I comprehended it fully.

Though critics have said it does little to ensure artists get paid for their work,

the success of Creative Commons has been enormous.

Currently on the website Flickr alone, over 200 million people use some form of Creative Commons license.

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