aves that people used
to live in, until some unreasonable person had a "better" idea (I wonder if
you would have made an argument for punishing him -- after all, not living in
caves might disrupt the social order).

"If I let you come apple picking in my orchard, you can't bring in a fruit
truck and some day laborers and strip the trees bare."

You are comparing apples to universal Turing machines. Your comparison is
actually that bad -- you might as well be talking about the superbowl than
Aaron Swartz.

Aaron did not strip anyone or anything. He prevented nobody else from using
JSTOR, nor did he stop anyone from reading the articles he downloaded, nor
from using the network, nor from using the closet where he hid his laptop. _He
caused no measurable damage to anyone or anyone's property_ at any point in
the JSTOR incident.

"If JSTOR gives you permission to access journal articles for academic
purposes..."

...then I should be free to use those articles for any purpose, because JSTOR
has no claim to them or to the knowledge they contain. What gives JSTOR the
_moral right_ to tell anyone what they are allowed to do with the articles
JSTOR provides to them? Sure, we have this thing called copyright that emerged
from British attempts to censor books in the age of printing presses (I wonder
if the Chinese firewall will lead to the creation of a similar law), but
copyrights are in no way related to modern senses of morality or justice --
copyrights are just a way for the government to promote a particular class of
business, and that is all they have ever been about in the United States.
"Right" and "wrong" are no more relevant to copyright than they are to parking
in a loading zone.

"nobody needs it spelled out to them that this is the case."

That is because prior to the attack on Aaron Swartz, nobody thought that
automatically downloading scientific articles on a university network would
ever warrant the attention of federal prosecutors. Now we know: don't you dare
download articles using any software other than 