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Notes -
Aaron Swartz is a tragedy. It's one of those cases where he was getting screwed because his lawyer didn't understand how to run a political case.
Lawyers understand the courtroom and how to strike deals with the prosecution. So naturally they want to keep the fight in the courtroom and avoid upsetting the prosecution more than necessary.
They didn't understand that Swartz was much more sympathetic to a lot of fairly powerful people than the academic publishers trying to protect their exorbitant pricing for research that's often publicly funded.
So his lawyers were telling him to keep quiet so they can make a deal, while the publishers were pressuring the prosecutors to make an example of him.
If he had made an aggressive public plea with details of his situation then all of the Silicon Valley tech people Obama needed for his 2012 election campaign would have gone to the Obama campaign and said "he's just a well meaning kid who made a mistake, cut him a deal or I won't support you".
Swartz would have just gotten probation at worst. Instead he snapped under the stress of the aggressive sentences prosecutors were demanding and killed himself.
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