Aaron Swartz was a programmer, entrepreneur, writer, political organizer, but most notably, an internet "hacktivist". He believed in the freedom of information on the internet, and was a strong proponent of the idea. In his "Guerrila Open Access Manifesto", he noted that The world's entire scientific ... heritage ... is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations....
In regards to his "hacktivism", he downloaded 2.7 million publicly available court documents from the PACER, a database of court records. Swartz believed the PACER was unreasonably expensive, and sought to make the records public. Swartz downloaded the documents using Perl and credentials from a Sacramento library. As of today, PACER provides the option to save the documents for free public access.
However, his most ingenious and widely known act of protest was his use of MIT's network in order to download an extremely large amount of academic journals from JSTOR and release them publicly. However, he was caught and settled with JSTOR in court to return all of the stolen documents.

Swartz made many contributions that are parts of the puzzle that make up the backbone of the internet as we know it today. He helped developed RSS--a web feed that allows for the accessing of website updates in a standardized format--, the architecture for Creative Commons, the web framework web.py--the foundation of the Reddit platform--, and the markup language Markdown.

The impact Swartz has had on the world is immeasurable. His actions have had major effects in the realms of technology, activism, and IP freedom. His sacrifices have created a foundation for new innovators and activists, armed with the principles of transparency and collaboration.
Swartz opened our eyes to a new world--a free world; and for that we are forever in his debt.