He was accused of illegally downloading research documents from academic service JSTOR, using MIT networks.
On Wednesday, after a 10-month trial program, JSTOR opened its archives to free reading by the public.
According to MIT, more than 70GB of data were downloaded from JStor, a subscription service for academic journals.
Employees of the government, MIT and JSTOR have also been harassed and received threats, Gorton said in his ruling.
"We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz, " JSTOR said on its home page Saturday.
The incident makes JSTOR look like an injured, even magnanimous, party and gives them an excuse to make their policies more restrictive.
He was found out in early 2011, the documents turned back over to JSTOR who was satisfied that justice had been done.
The hacking charges relate to the downloading of millions of academic papers from online archive JSTOR, which prosecutors say he intended to distribute for free.
Now, at the age of 24, he finds himself facing criminal charges arising from his efforts to download millions of documents from the academic archive JSTOR.
The conflict between Aaron and JSTOR led to the entire MIT campus being cut off from JSTOR access for several days, doubtless affecting the productivity of hundreds of MIT scholars.
After downloading millions of academic papers from the online service JSTOR, Swartz was prosecuted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and faced up to 35 years in prison.
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Swartz, after all, had no intention of profiting from the JSTOR articles he downloaded and even gave the files back to JSTOR, which then ceased to press charges against him.
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Based on this understanding of the facts, it is likely that Swartz violated several provisions of the CFAA. At the simplest level, he exceeded his authorized access of the JSTOR database.
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In the JSTOR world, this was a no-no.
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The victim in the alleged crime, JSTOR, disagreed.
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Swartz, 26, hanged himself in New York City in January as he faced trial on charges he hacked into the JSTOR archive of scholarly articles at MIT with the aim of making the information freely available.
Despite JSTOR declining to pursue the case, and later in 2001 making its public-domain resources freely available, the federal suit continued, with charges of computer fraud and wire fraud carrying a potential sentence of 35 years.
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The outcry against Heymann follows the suicide of activist Aaron Swartz last month, who was being prosecuted by Heymann for allegedly violating computer crime laws in his downloading of millions of academic papers from the website JSTOR.
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He was arrested in 2011 and charged in a scheme in which he allegedly logged into the computer network at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and using it to download millions of academic journal articles from a database called JSTOR, owned by a nonprofit group.
He fell foul of the law again in 2011, after attaching a laptop computer inside the MIT network (easily achieved as, although not a member of MIT, he was, at 24, already a grand old man of computing) and downloading around 4 million journal articles from JSTOR, the access-protected academic document storage system.
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