we will also be speaking with alex stamos in california and stanford, university. his a forensics expert. he planned to testify at an swartz's trial. he would have been a chief defense witness. we did invite mit and the attorney's office, but they declined. taren stinebrickner-kauffman, first of all, our condolences on the loss of aaron. he committed suicide last friday. the funeral was just two days ago. you found him breathe he hung himself in a brooklyn apartment that you shared. talk about aaron. was about what's or who he and what he wanted and the effect of this upcoming trial. >> aaron was the most dedicated to fighting social injustice of anyone i've ever met in my life and i loved him for it. dosed to say, why don't we this? it will make you happy. he would say, i don't want to be happy, i just want to change the world. open access to information was one of the causes he believed in, but it was far from the only one. during the course of this two- year ordeal, he led the fight against sopa, the internet censorship bill, which no one thought to be defeated

aaron likely knew this was illegal although the expert witness for his defense alex stamos argued that aaron's actions may not have been criminal after all regardless aaron was an activist who was willing to challenge the status quo of corporate war welfare copyright laws that restrict the flow of free flow of information from academic journals to movies and music on the internet and he was willing to blur the lines of legality in this effort in fact aaron was acting in the spirit of thomas jefferson who himself was not too keen on the idea of heavy handed patents on ideas and intellectual property as he wrote nine hundred thirteen that ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe for the moral and mutual instruction of man and improvement of his condition seems to have been peculiar and benevolently designed by nature when she made them like fire expanse of all all over space without lessening their density in any point and like the air and which you breathe move and have our physical being incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation jefferson one concluded in