Until he committed suicide in January at the age of 26, Aaron Swartz saw himself as a freedom fighter of the information age. The charismatic code writer and anti-copyright activist was arrested two years ago for breaking into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer network to download 4.8m articles from the vast subscribers-only academic archive, Jstor. Federal prosecutors threw the book at Swartz, charging him with two counts of wire fraud and 11 violations of the vague Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, or CFAA.
今年1月，年仅26岁的亚伦•斯沃茨(Aaron Swartz)自杀身亡。他生前一直自视为信息时代的自由斗士。这位魅力非凡的程序员、反版权人士两年前被捕，原因是他侵入了麻省理工学院(MIT)的计算机网络，并从仅对注册用户开放的大型学术数据库Jstor下载了480万篇文章。联邦检察官想对他进行严惩，控告他犯有两宗网络诈骗罪，并违反了措辞模糊的《计算机欺诈和滥用法案》（Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ，简称CFAA）中的11项规定。