Glenn Otis Brown, director of business development at Twitter, remembered the precocious 15 or 16-year-old he met while working as the executive director of Creative Commons, which provides a way for people to license their code or online work for public use.
Swartz's role there was to translate legal software-licensing agreements into computer-readable code — a job he peppered with humor, such as reframing the complex legal concepts as haikus. For example, "Public domain: Do what you feel like / Since the work is abandoned / the law doesn't care," or "If you touch this file / my lawyers will come kill you / so kindly refrain."
Brown recalled a blog post Swartz once wrote about spending 30 days offline: "I felt like I was in control of my life, instead of the other way around."
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