Reddit co-founder and RSS feed co-developer, Aaron Swartz, has died on Friday in his New York flat at age 26. According to his uncle and an attorney, the computer activist and programmer took his own life.

Swartz was arrested two years ago in connection with the systematic downloading of millions of academic papers from online archive JSTOR. This later became the subject of a federal investigation, with the trial due to start next month.

The CCTV footage captured below shows Swartz breaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer network moments before getting arrested by campus police on 6 January 2011:

If convicted, Swartz would have faced a maximum of R8,7m in fines, as well as more than 35 years in prison. In total, he had 13 felony counts against him.

These charges were deemed outrageous by internet experts who understood the case, and wholly unnecessary by the parties Swartz was accused of wronging. Demand Progress’s executive director wrote in 2011:

It’s like trying to put someone in jail for allegedly checking too many books out of the library.

[Source: BBC]