You can't deny that he took a persomal risk for the greater good, namely the free dissemination of public knowledge. And that's basically the definition of heroic.
To dismiss the entire catastrophe as a "cautionary tale" is heartless. People who stand up to the powers that be know damn well that it is likely they'll have to suffer the consequences. Aaron was fully aware of this, despite your claims of his naivety. This is a cautionary tale only if the lesson to be learned is: never stand up to power. For shame.
You may not like the existing copyright laws or the justice system. And I fully understand it, as I don't like parts of them either. But that doesn't give you the right to break the law. A society where people break laws just because they disagree with them simply can't work.
Your claim that laws must always be obeyed in a democracy is gross. Are enslaved people supposed to follow the laws in a democracy that say they cannot fight for their freedom? Are we to condemn black people who organized sit-ins to protest apartheid? Are you not aware that practically all rights we enjoy today are the result of activists who risked their life to fight for these rights? Think for a second about the implications of blind obedience to the law, and the ugly historical record thereof!
What he did was inconsequential and then he preferred to quit rather than face the consequences (to which he would probably get support from the whole internet)
A.S. looks like more than a prankster who never got told that actions have consequences and an idealist that was too naive for his own good.
Lastly your whole comment is framed as a personal attack. You say "inconsequential" even though we have no clue what he was planning to do since he was made to delete the files, and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR. I recommend instead that you instead try to read a little about him, he accomplished much more then you gave him credit for.
True, I had considered this angle but I ended up not adding it to the comment. But I recognize the importance of those factors
> the consequences in this case were disproportionate to the crime, with JSTOR listing inflated damages
No contest on the inflated damages, which is part of most legal cases unfortunately, but he could have gotten the best lawyers to this case.
> even though we have no clue what he was planning to do
Scraping files is an action on itself that gives several suggestions on what he was going to do with them.
> and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR
Well he was at least doing that.
> A few years ago, he downloaded a significant portion of the articles on the Westlaw legal-research database in order to analyze their sources of funding, in the hope of determining whether economic interests affected their conclusions. He gave the data to a Stanford law student, and she published an article in the Stanford Law Review based on his findings. [1]
[0]: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-d...