Aaron Swartz helped write the RSS specification at fourteen, co-founded Reddit as a teenager, and later built Creative Commons and the activist group Demand Progress. Brian Knappenberger's film traces that arc through interviews with Swartz's family, his partner, and collaborators including Lawrence Lessig and Tim Berners-Lee, alongside home movies and footage of Swartz testifying before Congress against the Stop Online Piracy Act. The turn comes on January 6, 2011, when MIT police arrest him for systematically downloading academic articles from JSTOR through the university's network. Federal prosecutors respond with thirteen felony counts carrying up to 35 years in prison and a million dollars in fines, a case the film's interviewees argue was wildly disproportionate to the alleged crime. Two years into the legal fight, at 26, Swartz hanged himself in his Brooklyn apartment. The film uses his death to press a specific question about how the Justice Department treats acts of digital civil disobedience, and lets the people who knew him make that case in their own words.