>Putting him behind bars for downloading bits is ludicrous

Unless it's your data that's being downloaded unlawfully, right?

Even then. In fact, especially then. I wouldn't be able to stomach taking away even one month of someone's life for words that I wrote.

I'm writing a book. I plan on putting it on piratebay myself. I'll have an option for people to pay me if they so choose.

Wait until you're perhaps older, with children to feed, bills to pay. maybe employees or shareholders that need to see a return.

Well in this case, it's publicly funded research data. US citizens should have easy access to this data since we already paid for it. So yes. It is our data.

"JSTOR told the Chronicle that each and every year, they turn away 150 million attempts to gain access to articles."

Then tell your government to either provide it to the public themselves, or pay someone else to provide it to the public. Either way, funding one half of something and then demanding the rest is ridiculous.

It's not ridiculous to demand public access to public data post Internet, when almost everything is electronic.

Other people and other organizations are willing to provide this data to the public at their cost. However they can't publish data that's under lock and key.