Comment Re:Schwartz was a massive asshole. (Score 1) 106
> 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).