Aaron Swartz in Aug. 2009. (Sage Ross/DPA, via Corbis)
In a memorial to Aaron Swartz, a group of online activists have launched a tool to “liberate” articles from JSTOR, the subscription-based article database from which Swartz had been accused of illegally downloading articles. The Archive Team, a group dedicated to preserving websites about to go offline, created the bookmarklet called the Aaron Swartz Memorial JSTOR Liberator, which allows readers to bypass the subscription fee on JSTOR. Swartz, 26, one of the cofounders of Reddit, was found dead in an apparent suicide on Friday. Federal prosecutors had charged him with 13 counts of computer and wire fraud for allegedly illegally downloading as many as 4.8 million articles from JSTOR in late 2010 and early 2011.
