Innocent Victim: A good documentary that could have been much better

I knew little about Aaron Swartz, the subject of the recent documentary The Internet's Own Boy, and learned a lot from the movie, enough to agree with the highly tendentious filmmaker that Swartz was without question a victim of the vindictive and self-aggrandizing acts of the Obama administration and in particular of a zealous prosecutor, that he was extremely smart and thoughtful, a rare combination of programming genius and brilliant articulation of socio-political beliefs, that his suicide was tragic and needless and caused by the relentless prosecution and not by some long-standing depression or other psychological imbalance. The message is valuable and should make all of us - especially supporters of the Obama administration, which I am - very wary and aware. Swartz's ends were noble if, in my view, in some cases misguided: the act that drew the criminal prosecution was his hacking into the system of a (nonprofit?) company that made published scholarly works including books and research papers available to libraries for a fee on subscription basis. I'm of two minds. I, myself, have published several scholarly articles for which I received zero compensation (and book for which I was paid modestly; also very minute compensation when my articles were picked up for an anthology). Mostly, we write these articles (could also maybe count short stories here, too) hoping for wide distribution - so if someone like Swartz came along and said I can make these available to millions, that would be great. That said, I'd want some way to protect my ownership of what I wrote and published; the "creative common" referenced in the film does that to a degree - writers allowing their works online for free but disallowing anyone from using these works for profit. So I think Swartz went over the line, but there's probably way to make more things available to all while assuring that the writers - not the intermediaries - get fair compensation, if any's to be had. (Magazines and distributors deserve a share as well, as long as the writers get what's due them.) That said, Swartz's act harmed nobody, the university (MIT) and the company hacked had no interest in pressing charges - he was simply targeted for his boldness and activism. I have to add, unfortunately, that as a film this documentary had significant problems, in my view. Yes, it's hard to do a doc about a deceased person - not like taking a camera into combat (Virunga) or speaking with the subject - essentially, this is a film composed of archival footage, most of it home movies and clips from TV news shows, and many, many talking heads. I know it's a huge problem for documentarians who've worked months or years on a project - but less is more, and you have to kill your darling - this film could easily have lost 20 minutes and been all the better. And I hate, hate, hate the uptempo music that so many docs use these days and the time lapse photography that shows clouds and traffic rushing by - maybe OK for opening credits (as in House of Cards) but not repeatedly.