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No, he was offered a bad deal. Copyright violations very rarely result in prison for first time offenders. He also did a mild case of hacking which together mig
by jeltz 6y ago
No, he was offered a bad deal. Copyright violations very rarely result in prison for first time offenders. He also did a mild case of hacking which together might have resulted in a short sentence. But if he had gone to court I doubt he would have got more than 4-6 months, which is the same thing as the plea deal.
- amyjess 6y agoIt wasn't because of a copyright violation. It was because after he was booted off MIT's network for violating their TOS, he went out of his way to find another way to get back on their network by unauthorized means and resume the same activity he got kicked off for.
- WarOnPrivacy 6y agoIn response to the question "What is the ethical justification for 52 years of stacked federal charges?", is this your final answer?
- manfredo 6y agoSwartz wasn't torrenting pirated movies. He was essentially trying to mirror JSTOR. He was programmatically downloading massive numbers of articles, and using mac address spoofing to avoid triggering rate limiting. He also authored a manifesto explicitly declaring his intent to knowingly break the law: https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... Copyright violations rarely result in prison sentences, but copyright violators are rarely seeking to violate copyright on the same scale and with the same outspoken ideological justification as Swartz.
- Nextgrid 6y ago> copyright violators are rarely seeking to violate copyright on the same scale and with the same outspoken ideological justification as Swartz I disagree. I'd say that Swartz's actions to try and make research freely available online (especially when said research is often funded by taxpayers and not by the copyright holders of the resulting paper) is more noble than for example pirates who publish entertainment material such as movies, music, etc.
- xwdv 6y agoIf he had taken the deal and not killed himself he would be alive now and a free man 8 years later. Instead he is dead forever. I think the deal was not that bad by comparison.