Reddit co-founder Aaron Schwartz committed suicide

26-year-old developer and internet activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide yesterday, according to his uncle. The sad news was confirmed by the lawyer Schwartz from the law firm Kecker and Van Nest.

Aaron Schwartz is a well-known programmer, research fellow at Harvard University, co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, co-author of Creative Commons, co-founder of Reddit, founder and former executive director of the non-profit organization Demand Progress , which requires the authorities to modernize the legislation in accordance with the development of information technology.

For the past year and a half, Aaron Schwartz has been under investigation in a criminal case for illegally downloading more than 4 million documents from the JSTOR database , an archive of academic journals and research papers. Although JSTOR is a non-profit digital library, and documents are available free of charge online, but some customers pay 10 cents per document if they use a special interface.
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JSTOR declined claims against Schwarz, but the prosecutor’s office decided to continue the case. In September 2012, the developer was charged ( text in PDF ) with 13 points, which threatened him with up to 35 years in prison.

No one knows what causes Schwartz to commit an act. The last time he spoke about suicide was five years ago when he was depressed after selling Reddit.