This news made me very sympathetic to the campaign by Aaron Swartz, a research fellow at Harvard, for the JSTOR journals to be available free, to anyone. In pursuit of his campaign he successfully beat the best brains at MIT by downloading nearly 5 million articles from their JSTOR files, with the intention of making them freely available. This led to him being arrested and charged with offences which carried a potential penalty of 35 years in jail. JSTOR, to their credit, were willing to agree a plea bargain which would have meant that Aaron did not serve time in jail, but MIT to their shame insisted on a jail term. Which led to his suicide. Aaron had already become famous because of his role in defeating the iniquitous Stop The Online Piracy Act last year. If he had succeeded in his campaign to free the JSTOR files he would have been a hero of students everywhere, not least me. He fully deserves the tributes which he has received from the great and the good.
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