To call Aaron Swartz one of the gifted youth of our computer age would be putting it mildly. By the time Swartz graduated high school, he had already made significant contributions to the development of two projects that are still important today and fundamentally altered the way we use the internet when they were introduced: RSS and Creative Commons. Swartz was a prodigious youngster with a keen interest in opening up the possibilities of the computer world to his generation. His dedication to this cause, eventually placing him in the sights of the U.S. Justice Department, never wavered, right up to the day he killed himself in January 2013.

Swartz's life was defined by developments in personal computers and his accomplishments pushing those developments to the next level. After RSS and Creative Commons, he was around for the early days of Reddit. It was then that his projects took a turn for the more political, including spearheading the conspicuous, successful grassroots campaign against the potentially devastating Stop Internet Piracy Act in 2012, which would have greatly de-democratized the internet by making it easier to censor websites over claims of copyright infringement. He also opened up an outdated, expensive catalog of public records called PACER, which stores archived court files. Even though the records are meant to be publicly accessible, the archive costs eight cents per page and is notoriously difficult to use. In 2008 Swartz downloaded 2.7 million documents from PACER and released them for public consumption.

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That move was one of Swartz’s first bouts of notable activism, and it also raised eyebrows at the FBI.

After investigating his actions for two months, the FBI decided not to file any charges, since all the documents Swartz released are technically public. The legal trouble that later plagued Swartz came under similar circumstances, though. It was when Swartz downloaded a vast quantity of academic journal articles from an expensive database called JSTOR that he was arrested and indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. It would seem the government interested in doing more than protecting private property. This was obviously an attempt to smear Swartz as someone trying to make a profit more than someone fighting for more internet information access. The government apparently wanted to make an example of this young do-gooder. Swartz rejected a government plea deal on basic principles, choosing to go trial, possibly facing a 50-year sentence if found guilty. The 26-year-old crusader for internet justice never made it to trial. He committed suicide in his Brooklyn apartment soon after rejecting the plea deal.

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We may never know exactly what Swartz was planning to do with the articles. We do know that he believed that information should not be kept behind gates. We know that JSTOR charges an exorbitant fee to access its database, one that most people cannot afford.

Details about Swartz’s complicated life and untimely death might be what attracts some viewers to The Internet’s Own Boy from the outset. While filmmaker Brian Knappenberger does not shy away from the fate of his subject, he does not attempt to use it as a tense thread from which to hang the film’s plot. You don’t get the sense that you’re watching a documentary about someone whose life ended too soon until much later. As The Internet’s Own Boy plays on, we get to know Swartz a little better. We are introduced to more characters who knew him, and we get to hear his own voice at different conferences and speaking engagements (starting from the time Swartz was fourteen). His character really fills out when we see him speaking in interviews. He seems effortlessly articulate and innately charming.

Knappenberger makes no secret of his bias through the interviews and quotes he chose to include. After watching the film, you’re supposed to get the impression that the United States Justice Department hounded Swartz to suicide. That the Justice Department hoped to use Swartz as a deterrent example — someone whose case would make headlines, scaring others away from following his example — seems to be a simple matter of record at this point. As more than one interviewee in the film points out, it seems like a case of misplaced priorities, at best, that prosecutors sought to punish someone like Swartz while the architects of the 2008 financial crisis still roam free. The recklessness of prosecuting such a trivial crime so harshly is underscored by the fact that Swartz is an icon for tech-savvy dreamers far and wide. The U.S. government has set a grim precedent for the bold innovators of tomorrow. The film does include an interview from one legal expert who disputes this viewpoint somewhat, but even he fails to assuage concerns about the Justice Department’s zeal in this case. It would seem that the U.S. Government wants to promote the Internet and computer literacy as the salvation of America’s economic future, while at the same time scaring the best and brightest minds away from computers as a career.

One thing we know for sure is that Aaron Swartz was a prolific genius whose life was cut tragically short. If he’d have lived longer, who knows what else he’d have created, what else he’d have contributed. As for the film, this look at Swartz’s childhood seems like a sensible narrative foundation in the rearview, after glimpsing everything that he managed to do in his short life. The documentary ends with a couple notes of optimism only after offering a bleak epitaph, from which the film’s title is derived: “He was the internet’s own boy, and the old world killed him."