'Internet's Own Boy' - A real story of the legendary hacker and information activist

On Jan. 11, 2013, Internet prodigy Aaron Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. Swartz, 26, a pioneer in Internet information-sharing who weaponized his political activism with that specialty, dreaded the prospect of going to prison.

At the time that Swartz took his own life, prosecutors were threatening him with up to 35 years behind bars if convicted on charges that he broke into a room at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and downloaded scholarly articles.

The young man's death and the government's threats to prosecute those close to him fueled incomprehension and shock that surged into anger. Swartz's many supporters in the computer world and the media called federal prosecutors overzealous and charged them with an overreach that turned deadly.

Brian Knappenberger’s Kickstarter-funded documentary “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz,” which premiered at Sundance barely a year after the legendary hacker, programmer and information activist, feels like the beginning of a conversation about Swartz and his legacy rather than the final word.

Today it will be released in theaters(US), arriving in the middle of an evolving debate about what the Internet is, whose interests it serves and how best to manage it, now that the techno-utopian dreams that sounded so great in Wired magazine circa 1996 have begun to ring distinctly hollow.

"We made the film fairly quickly," Knappenberger told Detroit Free Press in a phone interview. "It debuted at Sundance about a year after Aaron died. It was intense because we were talking to people soon after they'd lost someone that they loved deeply. ... It was very emotional."

"It was striking to me that not a lot of people had talked about his case," Knappenberger says. "I didn't realize why that was until I started making the film. ... He didn't want to talk about it with too many people because he thought it might be a cause for the prosecutors to try to interview them. And he didn't want to anger the prosecutors by making too much of a public spectacle of it, so he actively tried to keep it quiet."

Here you can see the official trailer of 'Internet's Own Boy':