The difference between Google and Aaron Swartz

"I was also reminded of my own attempts at similar work, collecting and analyzing journal articles, patents, and various forms of metadata. I’ve lost count of how many hours I’ve spent sitting in basements of academic buildings, breaking federal laws in the pursuit of answers. And I was reminded of my colleagues who still spend their days painstakingly scraping data off the web–sometimes legally sometimes not–the name of academic inquiry. None of us want to break the law. It’s simply that we don’t have a choice....I formed my opinion on the matter as a undergraduate assistant in a major neuroscience laboratory–building publishing tools to help the lab’s director break copyright law....I asked about the legality what we were doing and was told not to worry. If the journals didn’t like him bending or breaking the law he’d publish elsewhere and it would be their loss. As far as I know the publishers understood the bargain and never complained. Unfortunately this sort of non-aggression pact is available only to a select few....But for those of us interested in meta-analysis...the hobbled and clunky tools for downloading PDFs through research library proxy servers, one poorly OCR’ed page at a time, simply do not work. That said, it’s unclear what Swartz’s intentions for his scraped JSTOR content was. Some folks, including the FBI, have made the claim he was planning to redistribute the data. Others have pointed to his past research analyzing influence in academic writing. I have no insight into his real intentions, however, I do believe the latter goal is important and likely not possible without breaking the kinds of laws discussed above...."