It is. I feel that people are too ready to deify Aaron Swartz and act like he held no responsibility in what happened.
He’s certainly responsible for his actions, but they were not wrong, I think. And he was obviously unjustly persecuted for his actions.
I think it’s accurate for us to celebrate SCOTUS ruling that the way the feds prosecuted Swartz was wrong and recognize that it will help prevent future Swartz.
It doesn’t matter what the action of the equipment or the morality of it. It’s not like it would be bad for a student or professor to put up crypto miners, but then good if they donate them to charity.
And that is not to even mention the fact that his actions caused effectively a denial of service attack on jstor from MIT.
I’ve attended and visited quite a few universities and they all had liberal network access policies. So the idea of anyone caring about someone plugging a laptop into a lanport and downloading millions of text files is not remarkable and happens all the time, I expect.
There was no “denial of service” on jstor as it was still available during the whole time. And if jstor can’t handle a single laptop scraping every article, then that seems to be more of a problem with jstor.
Students scrape jstor and other journal sites frequently and seems like a pretty decent use case that I want to support at my university, if I had one.
Crypto miners are a different story as they consume resources and if Swartz had set up a hundred laptops or a bunch of gpus and used university resources, I’d have a different story.
But the idea that a single laptop running in a closet for a weekend had any material impact on MIT or jstor is so laughable that I don’t understand how anyone honestly presents it as an argument.
Swartz did not deserve to be driven to suicide for this. He did not deserve jail time, or to be arrested. At worst he deserved to be the defendant in a fairly low-stakes civil suit, and maybe even lose. But that's it.