[gknoy]

Really? I felt that what happened to Aaron was a tragic injustice on many levels (from the fact that he was charged at all to the number of charges they threw at him), but for some reason I had always thought that it was fairly well-known that that was his intent.

I have no idea where I got that impression from, but I do recall reading several articles about him, as well as his blog around that time. It's possible I just internalized others' assumptions about his behavior, but it certainly seemed like an in-character thing for him to to.

[yupyup54133]

IIRC, he had published a manifesto about how he believed that information that was paid for with public funds should be free for the public to view. However, I don't believe that he ever mentioned why he was making get requests to JSTOR's servers and I know that he never uploaded any of those JSTOR documents to the internet for public download.

[WealthVsSurvive]

Yeah, but any decent criminal lawyer could tear "he once wrote a manifesto" to shreds. His political beliefs would only be pertinent if he wrote the manifesto somehow in connection with what he was doing; otherwise, it would not be sufficient to show intent to distribute.

[throwaway2048]

Criminal law is about proving things, not in-charachter assumptions.

[jrockway]

Intent is the sticking point for the vast majority of prosecutions. That's why you have a jury, not Compute-o-Bot 9000.