Just so we're on the same page, the number I've seen is a "$1.5 million bill" that the libraries racked (but presumably they would have paid nothing since they were piloting free access.) Something's a bit off about how they cry about millions when it's a good that's legally required to be produced, is public information, and they set their own price for the digital distribution. Anyway, maybe this is just me, but if I were running a public access program freely providing information and noticed a lot of that free information being downloaded, my first reaction wouldn't be to call up the FBI. I don't know if this file[1] is leading with a retroactive summary, but it sounds like they knew from the beginning exactly what was going on, and that it wasn't a real breach. And if I were going to sic the FBI, I'd have a better reason than the fact that volunteers shared their free accounts ("AARON SWARTZ would have known his access was unauthorized because it was with a password that did not belonged to him.") I guess this means they would have been perfectly fine with it if he used his own creds? Yeah, right... It sounds a lot more like a powerful institution pissed off that their monopolized data is being freed and having the FBI on speed dial, not one that was actually concerned about a breach.

It does seem like a "first world problem" to complain about whether you can download arbitrary court documents for free. But, if you're in the first world and the 21st century, reading about a court case at home in your online newspaper, why shouldn't you be able to instantly and freely consult the actual public court documents online? Or, sure it's great that they're "public" now, but the next advance would be making the documents more searchable (as in, search for free, unlike PACER[5]) and interlinked, so you can more easily find them whether or not you know which particular ones you "have a stake in." Swartz and others are evidence that there are people begging to build these systems for free (or at least on private donations), if the PACER hoarders would sacrifice a little of their $150 million surplus[2] and charge even a one-time $1,000 for a third party to get a copy of the entire corpus on their own provided hard drive. The courts could provide a few megabytes' worth of signed hashes and let third parties take care of the majority of the content distribution. People will seed gigabytes worth of data like this[3] and build free tools for working with it[4] if the "owners" would just let it out of the walled garden!

Even if they don't give completely free access, the huge surplus is proof that it costs less than 8 cents per page/$3 per document! (It's so astoundingly huge, I'm willing to hear why it's incorrect, but I'm doubting the NY Times got it wrong.)

Frankly I'm surprised Swartz didn't get charged under the CFAA for this. I can't entirely defend it -- extracting an auth token and using it from another location for full-scale scraping is a grey area, yet apparently the Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section determined it was not "black enough" to be illegal. Or maybe they didn't want to publicly draw more attention to the courts' huge revenues off of public documents? Some people speculate the zeal with which he was prosecuted later, against the actual harmed parties' wishes, stemmed at least partially from his PACER stunt.

[1] http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fbifile
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13records.html?pagewant...
[3] https://github.com/thejeshgn/philosophical_transactions_brow...
[4] The repo in the last link.
[5] http://sarahglassmeyer.com/?p=1214 "you have to pay to SEARCH... you can access some opinions for free, once you pay to search for them" A lot more complaints there, and more informed than my own. :)