Lawrence Lessig and Aaron Swartz (2002) / Rich Gibson / CC BY Friends and Commoners, It is with incredible sadness that I write to tell you that yesterday, Aaron Swartz took his life. Aaron was one of the early architects of Creative Commons. As a teenager, he helped design the code layer to our licenses,…

Two years ago, I was trying to organize my first Creative Commons-sponsored event, a joint CC-USGS workshop titled Law and the GeoWeb. I ran into Lee in the keynote room at the CODATA conference in Cape Town and asked him to suggest a speaker from Microsoft. Lee said he would do better — he would host…