People keep trying to convince me it's not evidence of two justice systems.

But it is.

For the record, Aaron Swartz never actually went to trial, nor was he "sentenced" to anything.

Federal prosecutors came after him with overzealous charges in an effort to make him accept a plea deal (they do that a lot), which he rejected. It would have gone to court where the feds would have had to justify the charges they were bringing.

But that never happened because he killed himself.

We don't actually know how this all would have played out.

With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.

35 years max, plea for 1/2 that was rejected. He was going to get the book thrown at him to make an example. 5 years minimum but I wouldn't doubt 10-20.

The rapist traitor that headed a insurrection on Jan 6 2021 has never spent a day in jail and is still the frontrunner for president to be legally elected in 2024.

He committed the idealist's perennial sin: He thought that because the system is bullshit, it's okay not to play ball with it.

"Hey this is a bunch of crap. I can be guilty or innocent, and the right move is always to plead guilty even if I didn't do a damn thing wrong, because if I try to fight the case they're gonna tack on a ton of new charges and they almost always win and I might go away for most of my life."

"Preach."

"I'm gonna plead not guilty because I didn't do anything wrong."

"No no no no no that is not the way to reform the system no no no that is a bad mistake"

Aaron Swartz was a fuckin hero. Read his posthumous book, it is wonderful. But the same idealism and faith that led him to the good things he did in his painfully short time here, also led him not to understand how to engage with the US federal government and keep your skin.

For bulk downloading science journals he had access to.

That may be so, but IIRC he was charged with breaking into MIT's networking room and illegally tapping into their network to get the articles:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261840/Aaron-Swartz-MIT-surveillance-shot-ruined-tragic-Reddit-founders-life.html

He didn't get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.

And to be clear, he wasn't downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.

And the trial hadn't started yet when he committed suicide.

Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.

He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn't have been found not guilty, but it's unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It's extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.

Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.

Well now I’ve got two competing claims, and I can’t believe either one until I see the authoritative history on it

It's also likely that he was never intending to share them. One of the things he was looking to do is aquire a large dataset to analyze trends.

In other words, he was charged for entirely legit use.

Behind the Bastards dedicated their last Christmas episode to Aaron as well: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-christmas-hero-episode-aaron-136561888/