There are people like Aaron Swartz, so I don't need to do anything, and neither do you.

The Internet's Own Boy (BBC4) told the story of Aaron's extraordinary life and sad death. Born in 1986, he was a child prodigy. By the age of 12 he'd set up a website called InfoBase which was an encyclopaedia anyone could edit. It seemed this young boy had the idea long before Wikipedia existed. His teachers ridiculed the concept, saying you can't just toss knowledge around on the internet for ordinary people to grab, interpret and amend. Young Aaron wondered 'why not?' If knowledge isn't in the hands of the people, then who exactly is controlling it? He soon learned to question everything, and that became his motto: 'You should always be questioning.'

By the time he was 14, Aaron was speaking at conferences in Silicon Valley where he was too small to be seen over the podium. He was then lured away from university to join the tech companies but soon rejected their corporate culture. His reasons were simple: he had unusual skills and wanted to use them for good, not for acquiring wealth.

He abandoned the rat race and became an activist after seeing how the US government and businesses were making huge profits by denying people access to information or, to put it another way, by keeping knowledge to themselves and charging you to read it. If you want to check public records online, you have to pay. If you want to read your country's laws, you have to pay. If you want to find out what your rights are, you have to pay. If you want to read an academic article about your favourite poet then you have to pay.

But what if you don't have money? How do you read these rules and laws and the vast world of academic knowledge when it's locked away, accessible only to those with a Mastercard? 'Apparently, the world is ridiculous,' was Aaron's realisation and so he started to change it, moving beyond technology into politics.

He wondered why America's academic research should be hidden behind a paywall. Most research is government funded, so it's enabled via a grant. That grant comes from tax payers' money, so why should the tax payer need to pay again if he wants to read the results of that research? And why should the ordinary working folk of America have to pay to learn what their rights are and what laws they are living under? Why should the Government and business make a profit every time someone wants to access a piece of knowledge? Aaron was enraged by this 'private theft of public culture' and worked passionately to derail it.

He developed a programme which could rapidly download millions of government papers. This ruffled feathers in Washington but wasn't actually illegal. The government didn't mind if you entered a specific library and used their designated computers to download a few documents, but they never intended for an internet warrior to grab millions in one swoop and liberate them for everyone.

Buoyed by his success, Aaron turned his attention to JSTOR, the site hosting millions of academic articles, and began downloading them. He wasn't doing this for private gain and would make no profit. He simply knew that knowledge is power and resented that big business was locking it away.

When he was caught, he expected a slap on the wrist but the US Government intended to make an example of him. He was arrested, strip-searched and thrown into solitary confinement. They threatened him with 35 years in jail and a million dollar fine. Released on bail, the Secret Service began following him, monitoring his whereabouts and pulling his friends in for interrogation.

The Government offered him a deal if he'd plead guilty. Aaron refused because 'there is no justice in following unjust laws'. He was spied upon by Stasi men - sorry, by Secret Service men from America, the land of the free.

Remember, Aaron was not a killer or terrorist. He had just downloaded academic articles, perhaps about calculus, Tennyson and plate tectonics.

Followed and monitored and spied upon, threatened and stripped and bullied, told he'd be jailed for 35 years, the pressure was too much and Aaron killed himself.

You could say he was defeated by 'the banality of evil', a phrase I've been thinking about a lot since last week's Eichmann programme. He was driven to suicide by the pen pushers and jobsworths and the government lawyers out for promotion and a mention in the papers. The government men who couldn't bear to see a rule broken or an allowance made.

And maybe brave Aaron will be quashed further by the banality of goodness because my reaction to his incredible, impossible story was to make another cup of tea and resolve to be nicer. That's it. I didn't join any groups. I didn't donate any money. I didn't click any petitions. I just sat on the sofa and, as my tears dried and my tea cooled, I resolved to be kinder. How banal.

Yet my trivial resolutions don't matter as long as there are people like Aaron Swartz in the world. They'll do the hard work and make the sacrifices. As long as there are people like Aaron, the rest of us can sleep at night, but this only holds true as long as people like Aaron aren't being hounded to their deaths. Until then, I'll sit here with my tea and I'll sip and type and maybe cry a bit but do nothing really.

But as my tea gets colder still, I can't help thinking of Pastor Niemoller's famous poem.