Aaron Swartz, the technology scholar, Internet activist and early Reddit employee, has been indicted on more charges in connection with the  Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) incident this past summer.

Swartz, as you may recall, was initially indicted in July on charges that he broke into a secure network at MIT, hard-wired his computer to the network and illegally downloaded 4.8 million documents from the JSTOR database. He has apparently settled with JSTOR but not with U.S. prosecutors who indicted Swartz on charges of wire fraud, computer fraud, and unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer.

This latest indictment came today in Cambridge, Ma., the home of Harvard University. According to the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office, a grand jury indicted Swartz  on charges of breaking and entering, larceny of electronic data, and unauthorized access to a computer network in connection with the illicit downloading of millions of academic articles.

Swartz will be arraigned Nov. 30 in Middlesex County court.

The indictment’s timing has some added significance in face of the efforts by the U.S. Congress to pass the Stop Online Pirating Act (SOPA), which would attach harsh penalties to people convicted of downloading copyrighted information.

The Scholarly Kitchen did an excellent job of breaking down the copyright issues the Swartz break-in surfaces for academic journals. In particular, it draws attention to issues such as:

• Are the legal penalties provided for copyright infractions proportional to the actual damage caused by such infractions?
• To what degree does it make sense to give network security itself the force of legal protection?
• Should the very concept of intellectual property be rethought—at least in the realm of academic scholarship?

My bet? Swartz is forcing the issue.  It is why he broke into MIT in the first place. He has a history of being an Internet activist. He is a former Harvard scholar. He co-authored RSS 1.0. He is the co-founder of Demand Progress and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.

Here’s the opening to Swartz’s Open Access Manifesto published in 2008:

The Open Access Movement has fought valiantly to ensure that scientists do not sign their copyrights away but instead ensure their work is published on the Internet, under terms that allow anyone to access it. But even under the best scenarios, their work will only apply to things published in the future. Everything up until now will have been lost.

The Internet is a central place for activism. That much we know. But the implications of its openness are now only beginning to be explored. That will play out as we grapple with SOPA and the complex issues associated with Swartz and his actions.