This is from his personal site, http://www.aaronsw.com:

He is the author of numerous articles on a variety of topics, especially the corrupting influence of big money on institutions including nonprofits, the media, politics, and public opinion. In conjunction with Shireen Barday, he downloaded and analyzed 441,170 law review articles to determine the source of their funding; the results were published in the Stanford Law Review. From 2010-11, he researched these topics as a Fellow at the Harvard Ethics Center Lab on Institutional Corruption.

He has also assisted many other researchers in collecting and analyzing large data sets with theinfo.org. His landmark analysis of Wikipedia, Who Writes Wikipedia?, has been widely cited.

He liberated millions of documents from the PACER legal archive a while back:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/10/swartz-fbi/

All of which were public domain court documents, it should be noted.

He has a history of collecting and analyzing large data sets. This sounds about par for the course.

33. Swartz intended to distribute a significant portion of JSTOR’s archive of digitized journal articles through one or more file-sharing sites.

Interestingly, while the Grand Jury Indictment does discuss evidence for many of the other accusations, they do not discuss any evidence for this intent-to-distribute claim.

Conjecture? Since his previous projects seem to involve downloading and analyzing huge sets of data.

This does not necessarily mean shovelling the articles out to file-sharing sites.

Information wants to be free.

Information doesn't want to be anthropormphized.