"But I do think he was trying to destroy significant financial value" Lock me up then, because I have been pushing people to abandon the academic publishing in

"But I do think he was trying to destroy significant financial value" Lock me up then, because I have been pushing people to abandon the academic publishing industry and share knowledge more freely for a while now. Since when should any of us care about what happens to those leeches? Is JSTOR's archive valuable for society? Not anymore because we have a much better way to spread human knowledge: peer to peer networking on the Internet. We do not need a centralized service that charges money for access in an age of widely available high-speed connections. JSTOR's search service may be valuable, but Aaron did nothing to threaten that service and I suspect that it would take a half dozen HN readers a few weeks to develop something just as useful that every university could run on its own servers or anyone else who wished to do so. We could probably make a distributed search system if we really put our minds to it; what holds us back is the copyright system itself and the publishers who will only allow JSTOR to access the articles at grossly inflated prices. We are not talking about something debatable, like whether or not the RIAA and MPAA should continue to have their business models protected by copyright. Journal publishers and JSTOR could vanish and research would continue to happen, scholarly articles would continue to be written, and human knowledge would be more accessible than ever before. Journal publishers do nothing at all to continue the expansion of human knowledge: they do not pay the authors of articles, they do not pay the reviewers, and many do not even pay the editors of the journals. We stopped needing them when the world wide web was invented (and probably even before that -- once global computer networks became a real thing, academic publishing became obsolete, and it has been propped up by the copyright system ever since). Rather than being charged with a crime, Aaron Swartz should have been asked to advise the President on how to improve our access to education and to knowledge in general.