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Comment by gregf | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to get a ton of hate for this, but he was doing it with the intent to redistribute the content for free. He didn't own the content. There's a big difference. That being said it's very sad what came about of that. I really don't think the FBI needed to be involved.

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> he was doing it with the intent to redistribute the content for free

There is actually no proof of this.

Really? I felt that what happened to Aaron was a tragic injustice on many levels (from the fact that he was charged at all to the number of charges they threw at him), but for some reason I had always thought that it was fairly well-known that that was his intent.

I have no idea where I got that impression from, but I do recall reading several articles about him, as well as his blog around that time. It's possible I just internalized others' assumptions about his behavior, but it certainly seemed like an in-character thing for him to to.

IIRC, he had published a manifesto about how he believed that information that was paid for with public funds should be free for the public to view. However, I don't believe that he ever mentioned why he was making get requests to JSTOR's servers and I know that he never uploaded any of those JSTOR documents to the internet for public download.

Yeah, but any decent criminal lawyer could tear "he once wrote a manifesto" to shreds. His political beliefs would only be pertinent if he wrote the manifesto somehow in connection with what he was doing; otherwise, it would not be sufficient to show intent to distribute.

Criminal law is about proving things, not in-charachter assumptions.

Intent is the sticking point for the vast majority of prosecutions. That's why you have a jury, not Compute-o-Bot 9000.

Yeah and Facebook did this crawlings with intent to commit CFAA - computer fraud and abuse, now someone call the feds quickly before the perpetrators are zucked into hiding

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