I don't agree that what he did was ethical. For me, and I think many people, it is clear that what he lied and stole. The works that he stole fall under clearly defined and well established copyright laws and which have licenses to which Swartz would have had to agree. He knew all of this and stole them anyway. He knew exactly what he was doing. This is why he hid his laptop and concealed his face when retrieving that laptop.

In terms of how this IP is copyrighted and distributed, that should be corrected at the funding level. The U.S. government (and other funding sources) should forbid publication and distribution via publications that do not make the information freely available for any science which they fund. But... we live in society of laws. You don't get to just decide which you like and thus will follow.

> right and wrong is increasingly being decided from the perspective of a tiny minority

I'm not sure I agree with you. I suspect your point might be motivated by a worldview (i.e. an ideology), as a opposed to be borne by evidence.

But I could definitely be wrong. To that end, point me to a law that is 1) written from the perspective of a tiny minority of elites and 2) forbids something that most people would consider ethical. By this I mean, not your outsider opinion on the law, but rather, real evidence that it is written to serve the elites and that the forbidden activities are considered perfectly ethical by the majority of people.