The Aaron Swartz Case: What Does It Mean?
In July of this year, Aaron Swartz, a renowned Internet activist and former Safra Fellow at Harvard, was arrested on charges that he had broken into a secured network closet at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hooked up a laptop computer to the institution’s wiring, and downloaded roughly 4.8 million documents from the JSTOR journal database in massive contravention of both MIT’s network-access rules and JSTOR’s terms of use. Although JSTOR settled the matter with Swartz to its satisfaction, federal prosecutors elected to pursue an indictment on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer. Swartz has also reportedly been charged with felony breaking and entering. He’s now free on $100,000 bail, awaiting trial and facing up to 35 years in prison.
