Downloading four million files, apparently. And if by breaking terms and services you mean illegally distributing protected content and threatening the business model of JSTOR then yes, I suppose that is true.
He never distributed anything. No clue where you got that from?
Additionally "threatening a business model" within its self isn't a crime. In fact one might argue that it is a very good thing. Monopolies have often fallen to disruptive technologies, should we go arrest the people behind VoIP because they went after the telecos? Or the inventors of the printing press because they put scribes out of business? Or the inventor of the light-bulb because nobody had to light all of those candles each night?
The only "crime" here was violating terms. For that they want to hit him with between six months and thirty five years of jail (plus costs, fines, and a criminal record). If this same over-reaction was applied to all terms violators we would have half the country in jail right now.
Anyway, I've used JSTOR a lot as a university student. It's a really good service. They don't create the economics of the journal industry, they just try to work within it.
And no, I disagree with you, Aaron's actions strike me as extreme and out of the ordinary.
I know there is his manifesto from a couple of years ago but we can't be sure what he was going to do with them.
"We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks."
Now here's the funny thing: The first two arguably aren't illegal or infringing. If something is out of copyright then you can copy it. If you interpret buying a secret database as actually buying the distribution rights to it, neither is that. And if you read it in that context, you can imagine circumstances in which the same could be done to journals in specific circumstances, e.g. as a call for academics or their universities to retain their copyright so that they could do so with authorization, or with the subset of journals that charge for access but still allow liberal redistribution by those who have paid, etc. On the other hand, he's talking about civil disobedience, which implies lawbreaking. It's a conflicted piece.
So you have that, and then you have the fact that he was known to do work on text processing that may require a large corpus of articles for a database, which provides a rational alternative justification for downloading the articles other than to post them to file sharing networks -- or perhaps he intended to do that and also post that subset of the articles downloaded which could legally be posted, either because they're in the public domain or were appropriately licensed.
The point is we don't know, and the prosecution has the burden to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. So even if you think it's more likely than not that he would have posted them all to Pirate Bay, do you think so beyond a reasonable doubt? Because if I was on the jury, to me, the above doesn't feel like beyond a reasonable doubt.
The notion that publicly funded research works are behind paywalls is absurd.
In any case, we will never know, because he never got around to actually distributing or doing anything with the downloaded products of public funding.
Not to mention, let's say we're talking about stuff funded by the U.S. taxpayers... are you sure they would want those scientific articles to be freely available outside the U.S.? Similar questions apply to things funded by the U.K., France, etc.
Who gets to make that choice? In Aaron's world, he anointed himself Caesar and said that he gets to do so...
No, but we also don't know if his 'keepgrabbing' script was checking whether or not an article was in the public domain. This metadata is somewhat present on the JSTOR pages so it's conceivable that he might have been checking.... or not.
This is about headstrong young white men deciding that the rules do not apply to them any more.
Anyway, I don't care how accomplished you are, you don't get to decide that you don't like an arbitrary subset of the social contract and hence should be exempt from it. You are welcome to construct an argument against those rules and attempt to persuade others to your cause. But an argument for exceptionalism is no excuse for bypassing normal, democratic channels for political change.
Honestly I don't see why this point is so hard to understand. Aaron thought he had the answer to society's ills. You know what, everyone thinks that. Grumpy old men pissed off at immigration think they have the answer. The Unabomber thought he had the answer. It is one of the key advantages of democracy that we do not let individuals who think they have the answer just march in and change things as they see fit.
Should the user of adblock be facing multiple criminal charges if they visit a website whose terms disallow its use? It's absolutely ridiculous to allow these terms to be used for criminal prosecution.
Civil disobedience is a valid form of protest, and such a minor act of disobedience is ridiculous to throw dozens of frivolous charges on.
The democratic process for change in the US is long dead. Aaron had powerful enemies in Washington.
What conflation? Do you think criminal charges for violating a website's terms are not ridiculous? Do you use adblock?
If you think democratic forces in the US are still working properly, I can see why you'd find realism to be melodramatic.
And finally, if you think powerful enemies in the US amount to nothing, you are again extremely naive.
In any case let's hope you aren't caught using adblock and violating a website's terms and being completely financially ruined in the pretrial stages of a frivolous prosecution.
No one even knew it was Aaron until he finally was arrested. Give it a break.
Academia does not publish articles. Publishers do and they are anything but cash strapped, check out Elsevier for instance.
(1) this is an organization, not a person
(2) they're not being 'mugged' (see below), it's us that are being mugged every time we want to read about some piece of research
(3) whether or not they 'need money' isn't a factor
(4) use of the word 'mugging' implies violence, which was not applicable here
The law has long recognized that there is such a thing as 'the public good' as well as 'the public domain'. That didn't stop Disney from getting rich over stories already in the public domain and it won't stop publishers from making money on content.
There is no innate right to wall off a chunk of human heritage and claim ownership, even though lobbying power and money have distorted the balance of power substantially.
That I agree with, along with our problems with the public domain and copyright reform. I just don't like the reasoning couched in language about how much benefit a particular party has obtained.
E.g. we might decide that copyright period of, say, a year is hurtful and should be extended because overall (or on average) not enough benefit is obtained overall for those with copyright protection, causing an overall hurtful effect to society. But we wouldn't base that decision just on party A or B.
I understand you may simply have been using a specific example to speak for the general principle though, and if that's the case I apologize for jumping on your argument like that.
On another note, why is there only one 'kind' of copyright? Why do the same rules that apply to work written for profit apply to work written for scientific edification? Some differentiation there would go a long way towards solving these problems.
I believe there is no circumstance under which a release of the articles would have threatened JSTOR's business model in any significant way. And I think JSTOR believes that as well, which is why they told the feds not to pursue this.
I keep on hearing this, and it continues to make no sense to me, so forgive me for reposting one of previous posts (s/commercial value/business model/ if it helps):
It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date. Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely. Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408). So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.
JSTOR indicated that they had settled everything the needed to settle privately with Aaron. This was all on MIT and the Prosecution.
Aaron never did that. He may have been planning that but nobody can say this for a fact.
Ah worked it out, someguy did it a while ago, http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosoph... and released his version as a tribute to Aaron. Mystery solved.