I didn’t know Aaron Swartz personally, but in addition to encountering and benefiting from his work on a variety of projects, I’d been following his court case due to my interest in copyright and piracy.

The news of his suicide has made me sad in two ways. One is the sadness I feel for anyone that feels taking their own life at the age of 26 is a solution.

The second is the sadness over how his case, and others like it are being handled. Copyright was originally created not to enrich creators, but to benefit the public good. Encouraging innovation was the aim, and enabling creators to benefit financially was means to do that.

I’d urge you to read the moving post by Lawrence Lessig, who knew Aaron and the case details, and despite his loss, manages to separate the various elements of what happened.

What sums it up for me is that the protection of a collection of academic articles, and the alleged value of them has led to the loss of someone who

was fortunate Reddit turned out as it did, but from his work building the RSS standard, to his work architecting Creative Commons, to his work liberating public records, to his work building a free public library, to his work supporting Change Congress/FixCongressFirst/Rootstrikers, and then Demand Progress, Aaron was always and only working for (at least his conception of) the public good.

I’m fairly sure the public good has lost far more this weekend than it ever could have gained from the prosecution.