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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz And the US is not the only jurisdiction
by snickerdoodle12 1y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
And the US is not the only jurisdiction
- gruez 1y agoThat's not the same as piracy though. He wasn't downloading millions of scientific papers from libgen or sci-hub, he was downloading them directly from jstor. Indeed, none of his charge was for copyright infringement. It was for stuff like "breaking and entering" and "unauthorized access to a computer network".
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoThe exact same charges could apply to the AI scrapers illegitimately accessing random websites.
- gruez 1y agoPart of the accusation comes from the fact that Swartz accessed the downloads through a MIT network closet, which AI companies wasn't doing. The equivalent to that would be if openai broke into a wiring closet at Disneyland to download Disney movies.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoThe CFAA is vague enough to punish unauthorized access to a computer system. I don't have an example case in mind, but people have gotten in trouble for scraping websites before while ignoring e.g. robots.txt
- gruez 1y agoThe CFAA might be vague, but the case law on scraping pretty much has been resolved to "it's pretty much legal except in very limited circumstances". It's regrettable that less resourced defendants were harassed before large corporations were able to secure such rulings, but the rulings that allowed scraping occurred before AI companies' scraping was done, so it's unclear why AI companies in particular should be getting flak here.
- kube-system 1y agoI haven’t seen any accusations that they’ve done that, though. Usually people get pirated material from sources that intentionally share pirated material.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoThey're not just training on pirated content, they've also scraped literally the entire internet and used that too.
- kube-system 1y agoScraping the public internet is also not a CFAA violation
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoCFAA bans accessing a protected computer without authorization. Hitting URLs denied by robots.txt has been argued to be just that.
- dragonwriter 1y ago> Hitting URLs denied by robots.txt has been argued to be just that. "Has been argued" -- sure, but never successfully; in fact, in HiQ v. LinkedIn, the 9th Circuit ruled (twice, both before and on remand again after and applying the Supreme Court ruling in Van Buren v. US) against a cease and desist on top of robots.txt to stop accessing data on a public website constituting "without authorization" under the CFAA.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoNow do every other jurisdiction
- gruez 1y ago
- dragonwriter 1y agoNo, they couldn't, since the then-novel and untested strained interpretation of the CFAA that the prosecutor was relying on has since been tested in the courts and soundly rejected.
- alphan0n 1y agoAaron Swartz was not jailed or even charged for copyright infringement. The discussion and the comment I replied to is centered around US companies and jurisdiction.
- snickerdoodle12 1y agoThe thread is centered around US companies, but not US jurisdiction.