Open-Access Activist Faces Additional Felony Charges for Rogue Downloads

A well-known computer programmer and activist who allegedly downloaded millions of files from JSTOR, a nonprofit journal archive, now faces nine additional felony charges from federal prosecutors in an indictment issued last week.

The new charges are the latest in the unusual saga of the programmer, Aaron Swartz, who was first charged in July 2011 on four felony counts for allegedly abusing computer networks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and disrupting JSTOR’s servers. Mr. Swartz was arrested on January 6 after allegedly tapping into MIT’s network to download more than 4.8 million academic articles and files from JSTOR. The new charges came in the form of a “superseding indictment” that built on the earlier charges.

» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)