&gt;Just to play devil&#x27;s advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law.<p>He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don&#x27;t dispute that, nor do I think that that&#x27;s a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic papers, he was facing a punishment that could have gone to literally millions of dollars in fines and up to 35 years in prison. That is the sort of punishment that I would expect for ending a life (i.e. negligent homicide), not downloading a few thousand academic papers and publishing them on the Internet.<p>Should Aaron have gone to jail? Should he have been forced to pay some restitution? Probably. But I don&#x27;t think that holding the spectre of millions of dollars in fines and the rest of his adult life in jail over his head was the right thing for the prosecutor to do. Its very rare for a crime to break just one law. Prosecutors almost always have a choice of laws to prosecute under. In this case, the prosecutor chose the heaviest, most punishing law, when she could have chosen a lesser charge.