[raverbashing]

> Saying that he merely "quit", like he just walked out of the room or something, extremely trivializes depression and suicide

True, I had considered this angle but I ended up not adding it to the comment. But I recognize the importance of those factors

> the consequences in this case were disproportionate to the crime, with JSTOR listing inflated damages

No contest on the inflated damages, which is part of most legal cases unfortunately, but he could have gotten the best lawyers to this case.

> even though we have no clue what he was planning to do

Scraping files is an action on itself that gives several suggestions on what he was going to do with them.

> and you say "prankster" like was just trolling MIT and JSTOR

Well he was at least doing that.

[cooper12]

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]

[0]: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...

[1]: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/03/11/requiem-for-a-d...