You can't deny that he took a persomal risk for the greater good, namely the free dissemination of public knowledge. And that's basically the definition of heroic.
No one here doubts that he was well-meaning and good at heart. He was just very young, extremely naive, and seemingly incapable of seeing what he did from another perspective, which lead to the whole tragedy. I would call the whole thing a cautionary tale.
The tragedy was not caused by what you call his inability to see other perspectives. Monocausal explanations are usually wrong, and yours is no exception. Vindictive prosecution played a big role, inaction by MIT played a big role, the unforgiving nature of the plea-bargain justice system played a big role too, just to mention three causal factors.
To dismiss the entire catastrophe as a "cautionary tale" is heartless. People who stand up to the powers that be know damn well that it is likely they'll have to suffer the consequences. Aaron was fully aware of this, despite your claims of his naivety. This is a cautionary tale only if the lesson to be learned is: never stand up to power. For shame.
I think 'standing up to power' is something that is justified under extreme circumstances, but we're talking about copyright laws in a democracy here, not about saving people's life in a dictatorship.
You may not like the existing copyright laws or the justice system. And I fully understand it, as I don't like parts of them either. But that doesn't give you the right to break the law. A society where people break laws just because they disagree with them simply can't work.
Civil disobedience is a critical part of a functioning democracy. Defying unjust laws raises awareness of how unjust they are, and if the public is persuaded that the law is wrong then sometimes the laws will end up getting overturned. In the worst case the conscientious objector ends up getting crushed by the system. So when activists break laws they don't do so willy-nilly, because the stakes are so high.
Your claim that laws must always be obeyed in a democracy is gross. Are enslaved people supposed to follow the laws in a democracy that say they cannot fight for their freedom? Are we to condemn black people who organized sit-ins to protest apartheid? Are you not aware that practically all rights we enjoy today are the result of activists who risked their life to fight for these rights? Think for a second about the implications of blind obedience to the law, and the ugly historical record thereof!
We're talking about copyright laws. Not about slavery, apartheid, or anything even close to it. There is no one's life at stake and there is no urgency. If you want to change copyright laws, you are free to use the democratic process and raise awareness to it in a legal way.
He was fighting against unjust laws and policies on the use of academic research and trial data. Better sharing in those fields could definitely save lives.
The individual is morally responsible for all their actions, regardless of the legal system in place. The individual has no moral obligation to follow unjust laws, and in some situations a moral obligation exists to break unjust laws and to risk getting punished for it. Under no circumstance does "I was only following the law" or "I was just following orders" work as a moral defense.
Sci-Hub did a better job of making knowledge available
What he did was inconsequential and then he preferred to quit rather than face the consequences (to which he would probably get support from the whole internet)
A.S. looks like more than a prankster who never got told that actions have consequences and an idealist that was too naive for his own good.
Saying that he merely "quit", like he just walked out of the room or something, extremely trivializes depression and suicide. Also, the consequences in this case were disproportionate to the crime, with JSTOR listing inflated damages, and the prosecutor wanting to make an examples of him.
Lastly your whole comment is framed as a personal attack. You say "inconsequential" even though we have no clue what he was planning to do since he was made to delete the files, and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR. I recommend instead that you instead try to read a little about him, he accomplished much more then you gave him credit for.
I'm assuming you're thinking is that he was going to distribute them. While his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto [0] might support that, it's just one possibility. Or he might have analyzed the papers for personal research, as he did in the past:
> A few years ago, he downloaded a significant portion of the articles on the Westlaw legal-research database in order to analyze their sources of funding, in the hope of determining whether economic interests affected their conclusions. He gave the data to a Stanford law student, and she published an article in the Stanford Law Review based on his findings. [1]
I thought JSTOR didn't want to press charges once the data was deleted? I believe they were firmer about that than MIT which took a somewhat hands-off approach.