#17: Aaron Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013)
Tech prodigy Aaron Swartz shaped the modern internet while still a teenager by contributing to RSS technology and later working on projects connected to Reddit and Creative Commons. In 2011, federal prosecutors charged him after he downloaded millions of academic articles from JSTOR through MIT’s network. He faced the possibility of decades in prison, a punishment many technology experts considered wildly excessive. Supporters argued Swartz wasn’t trying to profit but to make publicly funded research accessible to everyone.
