He snuck into a closet and copied proprietary data.
No, he copied data that we, the public, already paid for once, but are being forced to pay again for access to because the government has not forced organizations like JSTOR (and Elsevier and other journal publishers) to retire their outdated business model. The data itself is not "proprietary"; it doesn't contain trade secrets or personal information or anything like that. It's scientific papers that were paid for by the public. The fact that every single paper is not on a public website like arxiv.org where anyone can read it is an outrage.
That said, I think Swartz knew perfectly well that he was breaking the law; but he thought it was worth doing so to fix the outrage I just described.
No, he copied data that we, the public, already paid for once, but are being forced to pay again for access to because the government has not forced organizations like JSTOR (and Elsevier and other journal publishers) to retire their outdated business model. The data itself is not "proprietary"; it doesn't contain trade secrets or personal information or anything like that. It's scientific papers that were paid for by the public. The fact that every single paper is not on a public website like arxiv.org where anyone can read it is an outrage.
That said, I think Swartz knew perfectly well that he was breaking the law; but he thought it was worth doing so to fix the outrage I just described.