Infamous Internet troll and iPad hacker Andrew "Weev" Auernheimer's lawyers have filed an appeal, asking the judge to overturn his conviction.

On Monday night, Auernheimer's lawyers filed a brief (.PDF) with the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia, arguing that Auernheimer didn't break the anti-hacking Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and that the government was set on making an example out of him. Ultimately, they argue, his sentence is about Internet freedom.

SEE ALSO: Why Was Hacker 'Weev' Put in Solitary Confinement?

"The case is about the freedom to surf the web," wrote law professor and cybercrime expert Orin Kerr in a blog post. Kerr joined Auernheimer's longtime lawyer Tor Ekeland, and Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF) attorneys Marcia Hofmann and Hanny Fakhoury in filing the appeal.

Fakhoury echoed Kerr's claim in an op-ed for Wired, where he wrote that "the future of the Internet may well depend on it."

In March, Auernheimer was found guilty and sentenced to 41 months in prison for accessing an AT&T public server in 2010 and obtaining 114,000 email addresses of iPad owners. At the time, Auernheimer shared his discovery with Gawker, and the feds accused him of identity theft and of computer crimes in violation of the CFAA.

In the appeal, Auernheimer lawyers argued that he actually didn't violate the CFAA because he simply accessed a public server, something that doesn't constitute "unauthorized access," which is what the law criminalizes.

"The fundamental question in this case is whether it is a crime to visit a public website," the lawyers wrote in the brief. "By posting information on the public web without a password requirement, AT&T made the information available to everyone."

Moreover, the lawyers also argued that the prosecution overreached in its use of the much-maligned CFAA, a 1986 law that has been criticized for its vagueness, and for being outdated.

"Auernheimer was aggressively prosecuted for an act that caused little harm and was intended to be — and ultimately was — in the public interest," said attorney Marcia Hofmann. "The CFAA's vague language gives prosecutors great latitude to abuse their discretion and throw the book at people they simply don't like. That's as evident here as it was in the prosecution of Aaron Swartz."

In fact, the CFAA is the same law used to prosecute Internet activist and hacker Aaron Swartz, who committed suicide in January, while awaiting trial for downloading millions of scholarly articles from the JSTOR database. After his death, legislators introduced a bill called "Aaron's Law" to modernize the CFAA.

After sentencing, Auernheimer was moved to a prison in Brooklyn, N.Y., and then transferred to a federal low-security prison in Allenwood, Pa. During his time in jail, Auernheimer has maintained his online presence, first with his trademark incendiary messages on Twitter, and then by posting audio messages to his SoundCloud account.

His email and phone access was then cut off, and it was allegedly for these Internet feats that he was put in solitary confinement, according to his lawyer Tor Ekeland.

On June 26, he (or somebody posting from his account) came back online to share an op-ed via TechCrunch titled "State Machinery for State Machines."

"Let our electronic freedoms not sway in the shifting whims of dying governments," he wrote.

Image courtesy of Flickr, pinguino