Aaron Swartz builds a reputation as a coder before he's out of his teens, helping write the RSS specification at fourteen and later co-founding Reddit while still a teenager. The film follows him from that early technical work into political organizing, tracing his role in the 2012 campaign that killed the SOPA legislation and his growing conviction that information locked behind paywalls was a form of injustice. That conviction leads him to MIT, where he connects a laptop to the network closet and downloads millions of academic articles from the JSTOR database, an act that draws federal prosecutors and the threat of decades in prison under computer fraud statutes meant for far more serious crimes. Director Brian Knappenberger builds the case through interviews with Swartz's family, his partner, fellow programmers, and the lawyers who fought his prosecution, alongside home movies and footage of him testifying before Congress. The two-year legal fight ends with Swartz's suicide at 26, and the film closes on the question of what the case was actually meant to punish.