Activist and programmer Aaron Swartz has been indicted for downloading more the four million articles from the academic repository JSTOR. Aaron is a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Ethics, co-author of the RSS 1.0 specification, founder of Demand Progress, theinfo.org, watchdog.net and a co-founder of reddit. He was arrested on 19 July 2011 and released on bail. Even though JSTOR says it is not pursuing civil litigation, the US Attorney General has criminally charged him with violating federal hacking laws. If convicted, Aaron faces maximum jail terms of 35 years and possible fines of up to one million US$.
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- Harvard’s Aaron Swartz indicted on MIT hacking charges, The Guardian, 21.7.2011
- JSTOR and the case of the over-downloader, New Yorker, 21.7.2011
- Thousands of scientific papers uploaded to the Pirate Bay, GigaOM, 21.7.2011
- Feds Charge Activist as Hacker for Downloading Millions of Academic Articles, Wired, 19.7.2011