The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz Page #4

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

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