

Can somebody explain to me the 30 years in prison Aaron Swartz was facing? - itry

I read everywhere, that Aaron was facing decades in prison. But no explanation how this was calculated.<p>Most articles say the main charge was gaining unauthorized access to a protected computer. But not everyone who circumvents some security system will spend half of his life in prison, right?<p>So was it because of the value of the data he copied? If so, what is the formulat that is used to turn "value of copied stuff" into "years in prison"?
======
shail
I am no lawyer. But my guess is that when you commit a crime, they look at
each and every action of yours and try to find out which all laws and how many
times were you breaking them. Then they weigh in the sentence or each of them
separately and add them up eventually amounting them to disproportionate
numbers (35 yrs) in many cases. I think theoretically this number can run unto
multiple of 100s even.

