In his too-short life, Aaron Swartz reshaped the Internet and questioned our assumptions about intellectual property. His tragic suicide in 2013 at the age of 26 after being aggressively prosecuted for copyright infringement shocked the world. Here, for the first time in print, is revealed the quintessential Aaron Swartz: besides being a technical genius and a passionate activist, he was also an insightful, compelling and cutting essayist. He wrote thoughtfully and humorously about intellectual property, copyright and the architecture of the Internet.

In January 2013, Aaron Swartz, under arrest and threatened with thirty-five years of imprisonment for downloading material from the JSTOR database, committed suicide. He was twenty-six years old. But in that time he had changed the world we live in: reshaping the Internet, questioning our assumptions about intellectual property, and creating some of the tools we use in our daily online lives. Besides being a technical genius and a passionate activist, he was also an insightful, compelling, and cutting critic of the politics of the Web. In this collection of his writings that spans over a decade he shows his passion for and in-depth knowledge of intellectual property, copyright, and the architecture of the Internet. The Boy Who Could Change the World contains the life's work of one of the most original minds of our time.