Aaron Swartz (blog), internet activist and former Harvard Scholar (Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption) has been indicted by the federal government of the USA. Recent resports in a number of outlets (New Scientist, International Business Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, New York Times) suggest that he is being charged with stealing almost 5 million journal articles from JSTOR. The charges could result in up to 35 years in prison and a $1 million fine. Allegedly, Aaaron Swartz broke into an MIT network to fdownload the documents from JSTOR. The charges filed against Mr. Swartz include wire fraud, computer fraud, obtaining information from a protected computer and criminal forfeiture.

One of Mr. Swartz's organizations, Demand Progress, is raising a campaign to support Mr. Swartz. According to them, "JSTOR has settled any claims against Aaron, explained they’ve suffered no loss or damage, and asked the government not to prosecute,”

From my point of view, if any of the hacking allegations are substantiated, surely I would agree that this consitutes illegal behavior. However, downloading articles for which the taxpayer has already paid to generate the data (in largely publicly funded research institutions and universities) should not be punishable, it should be heralded as the kind of civil disobedience the scientific community needs to break loose from the stranglehold the commercial publishers have on scientific communication (and thus the scientific incentive structure). I think the term 'Robin Hood' from New Scientist fits the current state of information I have very well.

From the current state of affairs, I would thus support the public campaign to support Aaron Swartz and have already signed the petition.

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Check out DarkRepository for a more detailed and nuanced but not less supportive account.