From a prof curious about the situation, posted with permission:

"I just had a nice conversation with someone involved with jstor. Here are some of the main takeaways:

* Jstor's objective is to make as much content as possible available to as many people as possible while also respecting what their agreements with societies and publishers (who hold the copyrights) allow them to do.

* In particular, they have a class of "Early Journal Content" (all articles published prior to 1923) which they *know* is in the public domain. Jstor makes this material*free*. It is *not* subject to the main terms and conditions of JSTOR: you can do anything you want with it, though they say "please be polite about robots" (see http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp#TC2). Even this limited step was resisted by some publishers, but Jstor was able to push it through.

* They have previously made arrangements to deliver all that Early Journal Content to the Internet Archive, though they aren't finished doing so yet.

* Thus, I believe the "Aaron Swartz JSTOR Liberation Project" (http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/ ) is both perfectly safe (does not violate terms of service, because it only downloads Early Journal Content) and completely useless (because JSTOR is already giving that content to the Internet Archive).

* I pointed out that lots of post-1923 material is also in the public domain, and that it would be nice to free that material (of TOS) the same way. Jstor fears that they are not yet in a position to do that. For one thing, they feel they need funding to continue to digitize and provide access to more materials (perhaps you can change their minds about this, by giving them technology and support to do this for free?). Second, because many publishers would not support that step (no apparent technological solution).

* Even if you think, as I do, that publishers are wrong about this, they have strong leverage: their ability to stop delivering material to JSTOR, which would be bad, because JSTOR makes articles more broadly available than many publishers do. For example, access to *all* of Jstor is free in much of Africa and in developing nations.

* I get the sense that they would welcome creative solutions, but that these would have to be true solutions that satisfy publishers, not hacks that get around the details, because the real risk is losing their contributors who won't care if Jstor is following the letter of the law."