"Little to no commercial value?" This is one thing is was absolutely correct: those articles had almost no chance of being sold at $20 a piece. In fact, the

"Little to no commercial value?" This is one thing is was absolutely correct: those articles had almost no chance of being sold at $20 a piece. In fact, the commercial value has little to do with the articles themselves, since JSTOR and journal publishers make the bulk of their money from subscriptions, which libraries will pay for regardless of the availability of articles by other means, and by offering search services, which Aaron was not preparing to offer. The claim that Aaron's plan would have caused any measurable harm to JSTOR or any of the publishers it contracts is dubious. It is also worth noting that the government is not supposed to be in the business of indiscriminately protecting commercial interests. Even if we assume that sharing these articles via BitTorrent would have damaged JSTOR's business, so what? The purpose of academic publishers in our society is to make knowledge available on a widespread basis, and if BitTorrent does a better job we should have switched to BitTorrent long ago. Academic publishers are not like the RIAA or MPAA; where the music and movie businesses can claim that their profits pay for the entertainment they release, journal publishers cannot make such a claim, because the research they publish is paid for by someone else, the peer review process is voluntary, and many journals even have volunteer editors. I agree that the characterization of Aaron's behavior as a "college prank" is unrealistic; a better characterization would have been "heroic."