Published at LXer:

We've been discussing the ridiculousness of the prosecution against Aaron Swartz, including the fact that if a federal prosecutor decides to take you down, it's not at all difficult to find something they can try to pin on you, especially when it comes to "computer" crimes. Law professor James Grimmelmann explains how it's quite possible that prosecutors could go after him under the same laws as it went after Swartz. He notes that he used to run the (excellent) blog LawMeme (which we used to link to frequently). After it died, he wanted to preserve many of the articles, and so he wrote a script to pull the articles off of the Internet Archive. While it all depends on your interpretation, he shows how a prosecutor could make the argument that he violated the Internet Arvchive's terms of service -- and that some of the decisions he made in writing the script could be taken out of context to be used against him.

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