The first thing you need to decide is, do you want to work within the law, and try to change the system from the inside, or do you think the system is so corrupt that it can't be changed from the inside, so the only option is to take it down from the outside? Swartz appears to have believed that the second option was the only option, at least in the case under discussion. Do you agree?

I'd like to believe that we can all be winners.

I think you're underestimating the greed and the ego of the people who currently have "ownership" rights to so much information that was supposedly the property of the public, since we paid for it being produced in the first place. Those people are not going to give up their cash cow willingly, and if they are forced to give it up, they will not feel like they are "winners". If that were going to happen, it would have happened years ago, once it became obvious to anyone with half a brain that the Internet was a viable means of distribution for information that belongs to the public--that, for example, scientific papers belong on arxiv.org, not locked up in some journal that charges exorbitant fees for access.

In other words, when you're up against greed and ego, thinking that "we can all be winners" is a recipe for failure. The people who are keeping this system propped up need to lose. Anything less won't achieve the goal.

Or to put it still another way: the ones making it a zero-sum game are the publishers trying to hang on to their cash cow, not us.