FBI secretly collected data on Aaron Swartz earlier than was thought

Did Swartz tell you that this was why he killed himself?

Or are you just spitting on his grave by suggesting that he was too dumb to understand what sentence he was realistically facing? Swartz had good legal representation, he definitely knew he wasn't in serious trouble.

Clearly this guy had been depressed for a long time, he had already posted a suicide note on his blog long before the whole JSTOR thing.

No, he killed himself because he was depressed and had suicidal thoughts.

> Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison. Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment, where he had hanged himself.[15][16]

So, he was facing potentially 6 months in prison. He rejected that, and then killed himself.

Morally wrong to sell untested and unregulated drugs. Alcohol kills.

To me, doesn't sound like this guy was at all on the same level of soft law breaking as Mr. Schwartz.

Do you believe this distiller's actions to be just and moral? Are you opposed to laws or something?

Popcorn? Popcorn sold potentially dangerous alcohol, drugs, almost certainly was guilty of tax evasion spanning multiple decades, was convicted of assault with a deadly weapon.

Bootleggers aren't 'innocent'. They're extremely territorial up to the point of property destruction and even murder. They evade alcohol taxation, they often don't report the income from their sales (because, well, duh they don't want more attention). In some instances they are often involved in narcotic/meth/marijuana/heroin trafficking, sometimes have gang affiliations, have murdered law enforcement officers, etc.

Popcorn was convicted, and served time, for some of those offenses decades before his last arrest and continued to carry on with his illegal activity. If you think selling potentially toxic alcohol, tax evasion, drug dealing and violent assault are absolutely 'wrong'. Those are the things we KNOW he did.

His last arrest, in my opinion the alcohol charge should have been dropped as entrapment, but he was a felon in possession of a firearm which is a crime (and a sensible one, given his prior conviction of assault with a deadly weapon) and he should have been fully on the hook for that.

It's unfortunate he felt the need to take his life but his case is in no way similar to that of Aaron Swartz. Aaron made a bad decision and did a largely digital crime, Popcorn was overtly a career criminal.

Copyright infringement is unquestionably not theft, this is 100% settled law, it is not ambiguous.

His indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...

Among other things, he was charged with the heinous crime of modifying his MAC address on his laptop's WiFi so that he could obtain a new IP address.

>And even that accusation seriously stretched credulity.

How did that accusation seriously stretch credulity? The technical means may have been simple, but it's unquestionable that he did so intending to circumvent access controls.

I think the punishment should fit the crime. If he photocopied every book in the library, how much time do you think he'd face?

Let's say you can prove intent to distribute; I still don't think it's worth any jail time. It's theoretically harmful at best, minor harm to anyone at worst. It's not like a large specific harm (say, stealing someone's car, which has a definite negative impact on them). It's more like... taking all the shrimp at the buffet.

Plus our copyright law is completely fucked anyway and encourages anti competitive behavior (the exact opposite of its intent). On top of that, there's a good bet that 99.99% of the papers involved were the results of taxpayer-funded research.

I don't think he's a saint, but I do think he got a bullshit deal by an overzealous, madwoman prosecutor and university - both of whom rely on federal funding. And everything that was "stolen" was also created with federal funding.

Swartz was not in eighth grade. He was 26 years old. You would not have been tried the same as him. You seem to have pirated a single song, whereas Swartz downloaded over a million articles.

But really, all of those differences don't really matter. The most important difference is: Would you kill yourself instead of going to jail for just 6 months? Maybe you would. I don't know for certain. But if the US's booming prison industry tells me anything, it's that you (like most people) probably wouldn't kill yourself instead of taking a 6 month sentence.

> Elliot Peters, Swartz's attorney, told The Associated Press on Sunday that the case "was horribly overblown" because JSTOR itself believed that Swartz had "the right" to download from the site. Swartz was not formally affiliated with MIT, but was a fellow at nearby Harvard University. MIT maintains an open campus and open computer network, Peters said. He said that made Swartz's accessing the network legal.

I should have used more accurate language. I think my intended statement is clear now.

There's somewhat of a breakdown between responsibility and criminal liability, and you've jumped from one to the other. The original comment was talking about responsibility, and in this sense, an organisation's internal practices, accepted behaviours etc. all share significantly in the responsibility. Often responsibility really is impersonal. On the other hand, the substance of your comment points to the fact that criminal law is served on an individual basis, and perhaps that's a good thing.

It is, however, ignorant at best if we stop discussion completely at the point where an individual is put in prison for something they did on behalf of the organisation, or due to organisation policy etc. since part of the justice system is deterrence, the organisation itself should be factored into that calculation.

Various mafias are also organisations, but that's a much easier case than this - shut down a mafia by taking the heads of the organisation. That works because it's not "just business". But in the case of MIT I have a strong feeling that if there is such a systemic issue as other commenters are hinting towards, it won't be so easy to be rid of it by putting the person in top position in prison. Such a person is the appearance, not the essence.