[Revolting cat!]

Sorry, that wasn’t meant as an insult, but the euphemism is prevalent, here also.

I don’t know anything about the kid except what I have read in the press, do you? Then share it with us.

What I have read however was that he was an leftist activist and a true believer. “Social justice”. Oh yes, a familiar phrase, very likely familiar to a leftist activist. According to Thomas Sowell it means whatever the speaker means at the moment. In another place the same Thomas Sowell talks about something called the “cosmic justice”, which is what the Left seeks. It is (social justice) in any case something vague, and as a post above tells us it means in this case wrestling control of some database from some organization to benefit some narrow groups. It can mean anything at all, and because of it believers in it are confused people.

Forest and the trees. Those obsessed with the government focus on the Justice Department. Others focus on the freedom of information. I focus on this activist leftist seeing him in historical terms and without giving him the benefit of a doubt just because he’s dead. There have been others before him, true believers, who following a Revolution remained true believers, and if they were not eliminated by the Stalins and Berias they often committed suicide.

An anarchist, or a libertarian would fight on. A Conservative too. And here we reach the gist of the matter (all assuming that the information about this young man’s fervent leftist beliefs is correct). The trees in the forest. Unlike the anarchists etc, the leftists believe, and this is the fundamental tenet of their beliefs, that the government is or can be a force for the Good, with a capital “G”. Imagine young Aaron’s disappointment when he finds the government of his hero pursuing him a seeker of social justice!

We’ll find out more perhaps, but I am confident, and the shenanigans of the Justice Department don’t particularly interest me in this case.

[meadsjn]

Seems like you might be somewhat confused on who are the communists, and who was attempting to promote intellectual property rights in this case.

Aaron Swartz, JSTOR, academic publication, and the public good.

Aaron Swartz was a Harvard University student who used his computer skills to collect a large number of scientific journal articles from JSTOR, the institution which controls the publication and release of most academic journals and which is also trying to achieve control of many historical publications. Many of those publications were scanned in the Google activity which is now stalled in litigation; I have seen no criminal charges brought by the Obama Department of Justice against the operatives who did the Google scans.
...
Swartz had downloaded some 5 million academic journal articles. His contention was that JSTOR collected money for access to academic journal content, but did not pay the authors or copyright holders, and made it prohibitively expensive for millions of potential readers to access results of publicly financed research. JSTOR is a non-profit corporation.
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Swartz’s death will undoubtedly spark new debates on intellectual property and the purpose of copyright. In particular, aggressive copyright protection of articles describing and reporting scientific activities largely funded by public or tax exempt sources, may not serve the constitutional purpose of copyright law:

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.