A suicide is always a tragedy, but that of 26-year-old Aaron Swartz on Friday has reverberated with particular force across the internet. That's partly because of the enormous sense of waste - he was a tech prodigy, helping develop the code for RSS when he was just 14 - and partly because the internet was Swartz's home, where he hung out and talked to people and built things that many of us use today. But it's also because of a looming and controversial court case, which his family believe contributed to his decision to take his own life - and which put him at the frontline of an ongoing battle over how much of the world's information should be free.
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