> Please leave us some numbers to talk about. Or leave your strawman somewhere else.

Yes, I think this whole discussion could benefit from that. I don't see that either side is actually giving us any real data.

> Military drones migrating to Linux

I smell a rat. And what are all those drones going to do when they get there? Mate? Hibernate for the winter? Migration, my foot! It's all a plot by Microsoft, I say!

GP> If you go to an "online dating service" where you meet a person and
GP> then pay them for a service rendered, that's pretty much changing the
GP> dynamic as much as you can (and would also be highly illegal in most places).

GP didn't specify what service was rendered, so I think we can safely say that the vast majority of services which could be rendered (which in and of themselves are not illegal) would be legal to render in this situation. Prostitution could be an exception. Helping someone copy their legally owned content which is protected by technological countermeasures is such an exception, in jurisdictions with DMCA-like laws.

Copyright maximalists might jump on this to compare pirates with whores, but personally, the only connection I think about between the DMCA and prostitution has something to do with, er, politicians...

> From what I understand, his intention was to release the articles to the public, but he never got that far.

As far as I know, there is no evidence for this, except circumstantial (feel free to reply with supporting evidence). You could very well be correct, or he could have had a more nuanced plan, like only releasing the public domain stuff first, or threatening to do so, and somehow hoping to leverage that to achieve other goals (like, for example, the subsequent JSTOR relaxed access policy which enables private individuals to access 3 papers for free every two weeks), but now we will never know.

> if it's abundantly clear that the person is a net deficit on the human balance sheet...

Said the person who AC thought was a net deficit on the human balance sheet.

> no judge

Well, there are judges, and there are judges.

Your logic is impeccable until you realize that all US IP addresses could potentially be being used by Americans who are actually currently abroad and running a personal VPN to their US domicile.

The decision to block or not is not arbitrary, and one could very well justify not blocking VPN addresses as long as the users actively represent themselves (by checking some kind of disclaimer checkbox) as being within the US. But since Hulu is more or less run directly by the content industry, I'm not surprised that they prefer to push foreign consumers towards infringement rather than servicing them.

> and Hulu isn't breaking US law by delivering me the content I'm paying for in good faith

Well, that's not true, since Hulu doesn't have a license to distribute that content to you at the location you consume it. However, since Hulu is a service provider, it should not be held responsible for this infringement, as long as you are willing to lie to it that you are in the US when it asks you (that's my personal opinion, not what I actually believe might play out in court).

> Just because the net outcome of action A is positive, doesn't mean that A is legal

Yes, a lot of people agree with you that many laws are diametrically opposed to common sense and/or are legislated for reasons unrelated to the general good of society.

> or morally desirable. This isn't exactly hard to understand.

Uh, no. That only follows if you are talking about a deontological model of morality. If you prefer a normative model, your statement is absolutely false.

Whatever. It's actually refreshing to see fanboism for something like JSTOR. Since I got distracted, I suppose this thread is dead anyhow...

> One factor that made Aaron Swartz's behavior so reprehensible was that he _kept doing it_, apparently at full capacity,
> despite the obvious consequences to JSTOR and to MIT.

If you read JSTOR's own account, available on their website, Swartz continued to download between September and January, but without them noticing it. Somehow that makes me believe that he modified his behavior (including throttled bandwidth) so that only a new kind of analysis on JSTOR's part (probably statistical) gave him away.

> But I do believe that was already planned when Aaron got caught.

Obviously I cannot refute this, nor can you back this up with hard evidence.

> JSTOR is a library service, a non-profit. They'll do what they can _afford_ to do to make the information available.

They continued to pursue Swartz in January not because his downloading was costing them too much money, but because they feared that what he would do with the documents would cost them their goodwill with their upstream publishing partners. They could well have been correct (no one can know exactly what Swartz's long-term plans were). It seems pretty obvious to me that JSTOR, albeit a non-profit, was also an ossified bureaucracy, and whatever changes have happened since the incident are due to their management suddenly understanding that the way things "worked" ten years ago was no longer exactly what their users (or society) expected now (e.g., when they were founded, 99.9% of anyone looking for academic papers through the net were anyway academics/geeks --- now, I expect that a good segment of the general browsing population is also interested).

> If you persist in this belief that committing a DDOS or other disabling attacks is OK

Judging from your Slashdot ID, both you, and I, then, have participated in many actions which you seem to consider DDoS attacks --- namely, Slashdottings. I wonder if you'd be OK, then, that you should be charged with felonies for each and every one of those actions? Oh, I forgot --- you don't have to worry --- you're not someone who has a public presence so that convicting you could be politically worthwhile.

As for JSTOR, I find it telling that somehow, suddenly, they decided that it wouldn't ruin their business model if they made access free to the 6% of their database which anyway was in the public domain. They're not Elsevier, for sure, but it sure seems that Swartz did accomplish forcing JSTOR to reconsider what might be better for society, yet still OK to enable their non-profit business to continue running.

Steven Chu was just recently in that post, and he is a Nobel laureate. Could this mean that "technocratic" has nothing to do with anything (except, possibly, someone on the net trying to get more page views)?

This depends, they might have some kind of contract with local government which obligates them to provide service. In that case not servicing prime numbered addresses would probably not be a crime, but would be actionable in a civil suit.

> because they don't need to 'justify it'.

This isn't exact true, all hell would break loose if they decided they "just" didn't want customers with Latino family names, for example...