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From Patterico's Pontifications:

 

The accomplished Swartz co-authored the now widely-used RSS 1.0 specification at age 14, founded Infogami which later merged with the popular social news site reddit, and completed a fellowship at
Harvard’s Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption. In 2010, he founded DemandProgress.org, a “campaign against the Internet censorship bills SOPA/PIPA.”

Based on Swartz’s history, his downloading of JSTOR documents was based on a philosophical view that information should be freely available. Before the JSTOR case, Swartz had engaged in another mass downloading of documents that existed behind a paywall, from PACER, the federal repository for documents from the federal court system. He used the documents to supplement the archive at RECAP, which seeks to provide federal filings for free, as contrasted with PACER, which charges 8 cents per page.

 

Prosecutors were seeking a prison sentence of approximately 7-8 years, out of a maximum of more than 30 years, for the alleged crime of downloading academic articles, in a grand scheme to give them away for free.

(Incidentally, the blog article linked to, describing this instance of prosecutorial overreaching and abuse, is written by John Patrick Frey, whose day job is an assistant LA County prosecutor.)

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