&gt; Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach.<p>Perhaps, perhaps not. There&#x27;s certainly safety in numbers. But this issue is not a huge social issue like, say, nationalist causes or other political issues. This is a kind of geeky issue that only a small fraction of the population gets but that everybody should care about. Also the law-breaking is doing no-one any physical harm. Nobody is going to go hungry because they are deprived of food.<p>Some argue that mp3 downloads have not affected the music industry&#x27;s revenues and profits, or at least not by the vast amounts they claim. Similarly I imagine the out of pocket hit to JSTOR to be pretty small, but couple that with the fact that a lot of academic papers were funded by public money then people start seeing things differently. Hence the open-access journal movement and Arxiv and so on. And what about the benefits to society brought about by giving wider access to knowledge? One could start to take a pretty dim view of the ridiculous prices the JSTORs and Elseviers charge.<p>&gt; it&#x27;s irrelevant to the conversation.<p>It&#x27;s not totally irrelevant. Stealing&#x2F;theft sounds worse than infringement.<p>Look, I&#x27;m not having a go at you. I just think that Aaron was justified in what he did and I admire him for what he did. There are times for emailing and times for plugging in a network cable, Aaron chose the cable and I don&#x27;t think that was the wrong approach even though it ended tragically.