[AnotherUnixGeek]

He felt that some types of property should not be owned, but shared with all, unfortunately the owner of the property did not agree.

Two things: First, owners of property do not get to decide how vicious or unreasonable prosecutions should be. Second, the owner of this property declined to pursue a civil suit and reached an out-of-court settlement with Swartz, in which he returned the downloaded material. Federal prosecutors chose to go after him anyway.

During his short life, Swartz made more useful contributions to the nation and the world than all the lawyers in the world ever will. If nothing else, hopefully his death will help awaken more people to the problem of prosecutors gaming the legal system to ruin or end lives.

[DBrow]

” in which he returned the downloaded material. “

He didn’t delete it from the servers when he copied it, that makes no sense. He returned copies of what he downloaded?

As for vicious prosecutions, look what they did in the Amerithrax cases, both men were basically tortured.

Yes, it is frequently true that crime victims have little say in how the prosecution goes. Apparently FedGov has little tolerance for people who hack major systems. Can’t wait to see Obama’s new cybersecurity EO’s.