Aaron Swartz

D'Souza, besides implying that Swartz was prosecuted because he opposed the Obama administration, way understates his crimes. He downloaded millions (not thousands) of copyrighted articles over a period of months, accessing MIT's network to do so. It's not anywhere near true that all the articles that Swartz downloaded were "funded by taxpayer money," as D'Souza states. (By the time he was caught, he had downloaded 80% of the archive of articles available through JSTOR.) D'Souza says that JSTOR ("the company that owns the copyrighted articles") asked prosecutors to drop the charges, but JSTOR had repeatedly pushed MIT to stop the downloading, and for MIT to get law enforcement involved in the first place. www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/03/29/the-inside-story-mit-and-aaron-swartz/YvJZ5P6VHaPJusReuaN7SI/story.html