> Why should these cases linger for so long?

Because legal cases involve tremendous amounts of back and forth, which is slow. After each order, motion, etc, all the parties get time (measured in weeks) to mull over and respond. This is intrinsic to the process--if the prosecution makes a motion, the defense needs to have time to research the law and respond accordingly, and vice versa. So any given case has a ton of latency built in. If courts only handled one case at a time, utilization of the scarce resource would be terrible, so they multitask. You can think of a court as a highly SMT CPU. Each thread (case) is full of high latency operations, so the court handles dozens (or hundreds) at a time and switches between them. This favors throughput at the expense of getting any given case over with as quickly as possible.

> Why is our justice system so dependent on plea bargaining?

Because it doesn't have the resources to handle the actual case load. You can think of this in terms of VM overcommit. Your OS's virtual memory manager will happily hand out much more virtual memory than it can back with physical memory. It's counting on the fact that you won't actually use all that memory (if you do, it'll swap and things will get shitty). The justice system handles far more cases than it can actually take through trial, both criminal and civil. It counts on the fact that most cases will settle (both criminal and civil) before they get very far in the pipeline.

> Why can't we create have a hacker legal defense fund that would keep cases like this from bankrupting defendants?

It was Aaron's choice to hire one of the premier white collar litigation boutiques in the country to defend his case. It's not intrinsic to the system.

> Why should expert legal advice be only available to those who can afford it?

It's not. Truly exceptional and meritorious cases will be taken up pro-bono by non-profit organizations (ACLU, etc). Aside from that, money buys better service the same way money buys everything. Aside from exception people who get a scholarship, truly excellent education is generally limited to children whose parents can afford it. The bar we set as a society in both cases is similar--everyone should have access to competent legal representation, just as everyone should have access to a decent education. But that doesn't mean everyone has access to Andover/Exeter or to Keker & Van Nest.

> What should we tell a friend who is planning to commit a crime on behalf of a cause?

Don't? Civil disobedience should be a last resort. If it is inevitable, work with public interest lawyers to establish a reasonable game plan and set up legal defense ahead of time. Swartz's case, if it was mean to be civil disobedience, was poorly played. If the point was to go after JSTOR, then the whole thing with plugging into MIT's network and evading their attempts to kick him off was just a pointless distraction. It forced him to fight on two fronts, one of which was much less sympathetic than the other (freedom for scientific articles versus the freedom to do whatever you want on MIT's private network despite their attempts to stop you).

> Is any middle ground possible in the conflict between rights holders and advocates of free information?

Does there need to be a middle ground? It's like talking about a "middle ground" between my rights as a property owner and the desires of people who want to camp out in my yard. Tying JSTOR into the larger copyright debate is a losing proposition, and an unnecessary one. It makes far more sense to work the angle that JSTOR articles are the product of substantial public funding, and push for setting up a publicly funded database for accessing them.