[rodrodrod]

What were MIT's obligations to Aaron? While there is a whole lot that MIT could've done to help Aaron (even if only just taking the JSTOR route and stating they were backing off entirely) and that would've been commendable, I don't really see why MIT had an obligation to help Aaron, so I have a hard time holding MIT morally culpable.

If anything, I'd think screwed up laws and an overzealous prosecution are the real issue here, and I'm not sure what pointing fingers at MIT accomplishes.

[pdonis]

I don't really see why MIT had an obligation to help Aaron

The Abelson report's take on this (with which I basically agree) is that, while MIT perhaps had no "obligation", it certainly missed an opportunity to use its position to educate the US government about a technical area in which the government is, to put it bluntly, clueless.

[shawn-butler]

http://web.mit.edu/mission.html

Now consider that someone using your open network in order to access a corpus of public-funded scientific literature with the intent to analyze and publish findings about any fraud that lexical analysis revealed.

Does that fit the mission statement or not?

I am deeply saddened by the whole affair and the extent it reveals about how much the institute has changed from a place of learning, innovation, and challenging yourself and others into basically a government-funded R&D lab run by administrators and lawyers. Determining whether this is the kind of place the faculty, staff and students of MIT actually wants it to be is what "pointing fingers" accomplishes.

It seems to me after reading the report that it was seen as a potential attack on the government's interest in the IP on MIT's network and that was the cause of the ham-fisted response.