Could you help me respond to the post at a graduate level?

To begin to critique this case on legal, ethical, and technical grounds, it is important to establish a baseline understanding of what occurred. Aaron Swartz was a computer programmer who had informal connections to the MIT community. In January 2011, Aaron was charged with federal felony charges relating to his downloading of more than 4 million academic journal papers from the online archive JSTOR. The downloading was carried out via a computer that was left in a basement wiring closet in an MIT building, physically connected to the MIT computer network.

Legal: From a legal standpoint, what Aaron did was wrong. He violated four major cyber domain felonies (wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer and recklessly damaging a protected computer). At the time in which the act occurred, Aaron did obtain information from a computer system/server he was not authorized to use. By legal standards this is wrong. Even though during this time period the CFAA was poorly written and drafted and potentially could be applied incorrectly to the advancement of technology, it seems pretty cut and dry that Aaron should not have been accessing the MIT server and using it to download academic papers. Do I believe that this is worth several different felony charges and tireless months of investigations? No, I believe that it is completely overkill and unnecessary for the circumstances.

Ethical: Ethically, I also believe that what Aaron did was ethically wrong. I understand why he would download the documents so that others could have access to them if they did not have access to JSOR, but to me, that just moves the burden from one group to another. Aaron moved the pain from the group of people that wanted to read the papers but did not have access to the papers to the person writing the papers being unable to receive the correct credit/monetary gain from their hard work. I know that under some circumstances, people do not believe that access to academic papers should have to be paid for, so what Aaron did was welcome to all, but at the same time, we would never allow someone to steal from an artist and then say it is pay because we believe all art should be free, do we? No. We pay for the work that someone produces. Some aspects of life are transactional and this is one that falls into that category. Someone takes the time out of their life to do the research and create a product so if we are interested in this product we then have to pay to use it.

Links: In this case, I believe that the legal portion and the ethical portion do have some overlap and linkage. Legally, the CFAA was so poorly drafted and attempted to be executed that "Aaron's Law" was introduced to Congress as a result (This law did not get passed, but it was an attempt to revise the CFAA in order to have greater fidelity on cyber domain crimes). Meaning that legally what Aaron did was not as serious as the crimes that he was charged with are for which lead to an uprising among the cyber domain culture. Aaron was highly regarded within the information technology field and the field felt as though what Aaron was doing is something that should have been done a long time ago. Contrary to my "Ethical" portion of my post, the information technology sector believed that those academic journals should not be something that is charged for, people deserve to have access to the knowledge and some of the articles were previously free until JSOR bought hem and then began charging for them. In Aaron's mind and most of the information technology field believed he was just returning the documents to how they were and did not deserve to be charged for what he did. In that regard I agree some, I believe Aaron should not have been charged as severely as he was (agreeing with the majority of his colleagues) but I do not believe he should have faced some repercussions, but not to the extreme as to what he did. The ethical and legal boundaries in which cyber falls is not an easy one to navigate.

Sources:

http://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf

https://www.wyden.senate.gov/download/aarons-law-summary#:~:text=Due%20to%20redundant%20provisions%20in,for%20the%20exact%20same%20violation.