Ethics are for rich people. Morality is for everyone. What this kid did may have violated some of the ethical rules a bunch of privileged people set up to perpetuate and sanitize their own in-grouped society, but Aaron had basically zero participation in that group so its rules must have seemed impossibly distant to him. His actions, however seem to have been both a benefit to him and to his community, vs the other choices he could have made that would benefit him at the expense of his own group. I'd call these actions moral, even if not "ethical".
How different really is this than when Uber or AirBNB thumbs their collective noses at the rules "the man" has set up that seem wrong to them?
Aaron's a hacker, and a hustler, just like us. One of our kind.
Allow me to use the Godwin accelerator to draw it all the way out:
"Ja, Herr Kommissar, I saw Frau ten Boom sneak half a dozen Jews into her attic on Tuesday" is the ethical answer. It is the only answer that satisfied the answer's requirements under the law of that time and place. But ethics had ceased to matter, civilization had already failed. Morality was all that was left.
There's a continuum, and being poor, black, and living in Compton in 2003 pushes the puck down the line a little towards uncivilized, into the space where morality starts to hold as much or more sway than ethics. We're just arguing about the amount.
I sincerely hope that your pronouncements regarding the ethics of those less fortunate are met in vigor with your efforts to right their systematic disenfranchisement.
For example, my personal opinion is that it is unethical to directly support companies working to put the Internet genie back in the bottle, especially for mere convenience.
In this case, the guy violated copyright law, one of the laws people tend to not agree with, so he is popular.
There is some optimal set of ethics which, if consistently followed, will lead to an optimal set of outcomes. We're not clever enough to figure them out, though, and so people will quite happily come up with their own, inevitably self-serving ethical systems in which "the things I want to do are right, the things you want to do are wrong".
Getting everyone to behave perfectly ethically is impossible, but telling everyone that their own self-serving ethical systems are perfectly valid is one of the worst things you can do.
