Swartz wasn't torrenting pirated movies. He was essentially trying to mirror JSTOR. He was programmatically downloading massive numbers of articles, and using m

Swartz wasn't torrenting pirated movies. He was essentially trying to mirror JSTOR. He was programmatically downloading massive numbers of articles, and using mac address spoofing to avoid triggering rate limiting. He also authored a manifesto explicitly declaring his intent to knowingly break the law: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... Copyright violations rarely result in prison sentences, but copyright violators are rarely seeking to violate copyright on the same scale and with the same outspoken ideological justification as Swartz.