I did not know Aaron Swartz, unless you count having copies of a person’s entire digital life on your forensics server as knowing him. I did once meet his father, an intelligent and dedicated…
The prosecutors involved should be deeply ashamed of themselves and have lost their jobs and had their reputations permanently scarred. Same with the MIT admin team who pushed for this.
Yes, this needs to be repeated loudly and at every opportunity. Aaron Swartz was murdered. He paid the highest possible price for his principles by being murdered by the US government on behalf of Elsevier. In a just world, the people responsible for this wouldn't just have their reputations ruined; they would be in prison.
I’m doing academic research myself, if not for scihub I don’t know how I would survive this academic world. And now every time I try to look for papers, I go for arxiv, thanks to the authors who made their paper available here, such a great impact to the academic research world.