> Harvard fellow uses MIT's network surreptitiously to violate the terms of service to download a nonprofit's entire database and then give it away for free, putting them out of business.
Do you notice the contradiction in 'non profit' and 'putting them out of business'?
Non-profits and being a business are not contradictory. The Associated Press and NPR are both non-profit and have the potential to "go out of business" if people stop supporting them and paying member fees. The best non-profits are run as good businesses...because you need money to pay salaries and keep the lights running.
It is also notable how many non-profits aren't necessarily what people would conventionally think of as charities, despite being given a special tax status, etc.
I've read the piece carefully and the thing that stands out for me most is the bit about the data being 'property'.
It is argued that since JSTOR claims property rights with a tangential link to another case where someone downloaded a chunk of software that was in wide distribution and used that to their defense which was invalidated is reason enough to establish that this data was the property of JSTOR and that any unauthorized download is therefore a breach of the law.
This is interesting because as far as I can see the whole of Aaron's argument revolved around this data being public property all along by virtue of the research being publicly funded and the fact that many authors of these papers can't legally distribute their own work.
If the law can't distinguish between unjust claims of property and a complete lack of public interest on the one side and the good intentions of an individual on the other then you can stick to the 'letter of the law' but that means the law is no longer functional.
I also keep reading about 13 counts, and here there are only 4, is there any reason for the discrepancy or is this commentary based on the pre-September expansion of the charges?
People will respond differently when faced with the same challenges. Just because one guy can spend 14 years in prison and 2 in solitary confinement is no reason to assume that we'd all fare that well. Plenty of people commit suicide in prison and never make it to the outside, let alone to become president of their countries.
Nobody called for her imprisonment or hounding her to the point where she's going to hang herself. Just a corrective measure to a system that has clearly spun out of control. A change of career.
The whole point of the tactics used against Aaron was to render his right to a trial by jury too risky and expensive to exercise. In both cases, the legal accountability of the Executive Branch is what's being undermined - by the Executive Branch.
I'd be fine with holding them there for physical security reasons; just ensure that normal US law applies as it would on a US federal military base in the mainland US.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Namecoin