Following the tragic suicide this past Friday of Aaron Swartz, internet activist and co-founder of the popular social news site Reddit, Anonymous and others have started a large scale online protest that may escalate further. Here’s a quick summary of the important events.

Aaron was a gifted programmer who created a company that became integral to what we know as Reddit today. In his spare time, he backed several freedom of information movements, the most easily recognizable being the bid to overthrow SOPA. But he had a special dislike of academic article catalogue services, such as JSTOR, which were only available to libraries, cost tens of thousands to purchase a subscription for, and wrote checks to the article publishers, not the writers themselves.

After writing a gripping manifesto, Swartz spent the next few years downloading millions of JSTOR articles from the MIT library, systematically stripping the database of value. He was arrested and charged under The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984. Before he could be convicted of the thirteen charges against him (and possibly face a 35 year prison sentence and $1 million dollar fine), Swartz hung himself in his Brooklyn apartment. And now his parents are blaming the state for prosecuting their son and driving him to this fate.

That would probably have been the end of it, except that the hacktivist group Anonymous, an international confederation of hackers and master programmers, launched a Denial of Service attack against MIT in an attempt to pay tribute to Swartz, as well as galvanize the tragedy by turning it into a movement. A Twitter campaign has exploded in the backlash, with thousands of participants using the hashtag #pdftribute to share PDF links to academic papers – “regardless of whether they technically have permission due to the papers’ copyrights” – also as a virtual tribute to Swartz.

The next move is up to the prosecutors. If they ignore this, or react prudently, the whole budding movement may just quietly disappear as the supporters lose interest. JSTOR has already agreed to make some of their database of articles available to the public at large without a subscription, which will again serve to drain blood from any movement against them.

There is always the chance, of course, that the prosecutors will react brashly, denying any responsibility and promising to punish Anonymous and anyone who participated in #pdftribute. If that happens, this movement will escalate and no one can predict how it might end.

We’ll keep you posted.