Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

Public defenders have something like less than five minutes to even review the case file before going in front of the judge.

How many of these "99.9 percent" of "just" cases are simply just persecuting someone for an invented victimless "crime"?

If the questionable legality of walking across an empty street doesn't perfectly illustrate how our minds have been warped by a draconian sense of "justice", I don't know what could.

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...

You claimed:

> Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial

With my sentence I wanted to point out that perhaps the problem is perhaps that part of the problem is that there are too many criminal offences - thus the judicial system is much too expense, which leads to the problem that most cases have to be regulated in the dubious way of plea bargaining.

I ask because, though I've never been near MIT, everything I read about it suggests that every one of these steps is seen as part of the game expected to be played by a few curious students now and then.

How is creating network and identity based locks around the papers not placing new locks?

US justice system has so much inconsistencies. Punishment for copyright cases being harsher than the ones for Actual crimes being one of them. Lets not forget that he is being called criminal because he broke a law, a silly thing signed into law probably because someone lobbyed so hard for it. He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private. At least the research papers funded with public money should be public property. But so much pressure was put on him that he took his own life. If justice system was fair, he could've faced it. But currently the system is broken. He knew that and felt hopeless. Pushing for things like banning him from all things electronic, and thus internet, is not the right way to serve justice. What reforms have taken place since then?

Perhaps, perhaps not. There's certainly safety in numbers. But this issue is not a huge social issue like, say, nationalist causes or other political issues. This is a kind of geeky issue that only a small fraction of the population gets but that everybody should care about. Also the law-breaking is doing no-one any physical harm. Nobody is going to go hungry because they are deprived of food.

Some argue that mp3 downloads have not affected the music industry's revenues and profits, or at least not by the vast amounts they claim. Similarly I imagine the out of pocket hit to JSTOR to be pretty small, but couple that with the fact that a lot of academic papers were funded by public money then people start seeing things differently. Hence the open-access journal movement and Arxiv and so on. And what about the benefits to society brought about by giving wider access to knowledge? One could start to take a pretty dim view of the ridiculous prices the JSTORs and Elseviers charge.

> it's irrelevant to the conversation.

It's not totally irrelevant. Stealing/theft sounds worse than infringement.

Look, I'm not having a go at you. I just think that Aaron was justified in what he did and I admire him for what he did. There are times for emailing and times for plugging in a network cable, Aaron chose the cable and I don't think that was the wrong approach even though it ended tragically.

For there to be a defensible claim of theft, the property owner must lose their property. Someone experiences something missing.

Infringement exists as a concept and an element of law because it is not theft, specifically.

I imagine that any form of non-violent civil disobedience is fair game. I imagine that collective action is always more troubling for the system because the systemic response is more challenging to orchestrate.

Some things change by themselves. We can see that marijuana is slowly transitioning from being a criminalised substance a decriminalised one. I don't partake myself but society is heading that way, that's plain to see.

Same with civil rights of all kind. Yes, it might take centuries but the arrow of equality is clearly pointing in just one way. But it does take civil disobedience and protest.

In this specific case (academic articles) I personally believe that we ought to cover the cost of storage and distribution and that's it. Because this is not a civil rights issue, more a, I don't know, societal expectation(?), a right to knowledge so that society can be improved quicker rather slower. These rent-seekers are like grit in well oiled machinery gunking up the works. I more or less think the worst form of money-making is rent-seeking.

I don't know, get creative!