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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

1704 points by speckx 2mo ago

Santas 2mo ago
“ The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” is a must watch documentary.
spelk 2mo ago
In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far, but I honestly wish these could be used to prosecute people who are treated differently for the same crime because of their status, or at least set a precedent that such activities are definitively okay.
- bigfatkitten 2mo ago
  In Australia at least, the Director of Public Prosecutions has the power to take over the matter, and they often do. They can then do one of two things. They can either continue running it if it’s in the interests of justice to do so (public interest, reasonable prospects of success etc), or they can shut it down, as they tend to do for sovereign citizen nonsense and the like.
  - darreninthenet 2mo ago
    Same in the UK
- amiga386 2mo ago
  > In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far This is what happens when they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal > Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides. Hundreds of innocent people went to prison, were financially ruined, thirteen took their own life, because a well-funded entity found it easier to privately prosecute its contractors than to question its software vendor. And the court system let them do it.
  - quickthrowman 2mo ago
    For some insane reason I am unable to comprehend, the UK government still allows Fujitsu to bid on government software contracts, despite being responsible for all of the false imprisonments, trauma, and tragedy you laid you in your post. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-government-contracts-121704565.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-govern...
    - pkaye 2mo ago
      I have a feeling Fujitsu took the blame for mistakes done by the Post Office in order to get future contracts. The contracts are padded to pay fines and damages.
    - amiga386 2mo ago
      I understand the government would have difficulty excluding Fujitsu under its own procurement regulations at the time (Public Contracts Regulations 2015). Fujitsu voluntarily withdrew its bids in 2024. The goverment passed the Procurement Act 2023 which came into force in February 2025 and there is now a national debarment list, though I note Fujitsu isn't on it. Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its own subpostmasters.
- qingcharles 2mo ago
  Some areas of the USA still allow it too, but it's rare.
- wahern 2mo ago
  Some US states still have private criminal prosecutions. > Second, this Article demonstrates that the government monopoly on prosecution is an ideology rather than a rule. As it turns out, the government has never had total control over criminal law enforcement—not even exclusive authority to charge someone with a crime. While some courts prohibited private prosecution in the nineteenth century, others refused to abolish the practice. Public prosecutions of felonies and federal offenses became the norm in the progressive era, but private prosecution persisted in various forms. Particularly in “lowly” municipal courts, private individuals retained the ability to file and litigate criminal cases. -- The Past and Persistence of Private Prosecution, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5210126 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5210126
- gib444 2mo ago
  In England, private prosecutions are used regularly by the railway. The threat of prosecution lets them do a shakedown to extract sums from people It was less bizarre when they were all private companies, but now many are owned by the government! Some of them have successfully prosecuted people over a £0 difference in fare
milkytron 2mo ago
The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him. There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever). Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals. The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole. RIP Aaron.
- jampekka 2mo ago
  JSTOR dropped civil litigation only after getting about $25k in the settlement from him.
- PearlRiver 2mo ago
  Is that not how it always goes? Robbing a bank got you in jail a lot longer than assaulting a woman.
- bigfatkitten 2mo ago
  And even then, it wasn’t really about justice but more for the prosecutor, Carmen Ortiz’s career advancement. The case ultimately did not help her in her run for governor of MA.
  - DoctorOetker 2mo ago
    the blood of a prodigy as status symbol make-up
  - IncreasePosts 2mo ago
    How does prosecuting someone who downloaded articles in a broom closet help her career advancement?
    - bitwize 2mo ago
cucumber3732842 2mo ago
If you cut down a couple acres of forest you own because you want to have a hay field or whatever you're <screech> violating federal environmental law <screech> But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things on their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local commissioner. What happened to Aaron Swartz is little different.
czgov 2mo ago
[flagged]
- HDThoreaun 2mo ago
  This country's lack of death panels is one of the biggest contributors to our heinously overpriced healthcare system. Insurers stopping doctors from prescribing shit that doesnt work is literally the only thing keeping costs down in the entire system.
  - czgov 2mo ago
    Ah yes. Those health insurance companies are doing God’s working protecting us all. They have no part in why our system is heinously overpriced as you put it.
    - HDThoreaun 2mo ago
      Of course there are plenty of complaints to be made about insurers. The death panels aren’t one of them though. Mangione had a horrible, incurable back issue, and wanted an expensive experimental treatment that wouldn’t work. It was good that he was told no, if only to stop him from getting his hopes up. The rest of us not getting scammed is nice too.
      - czgov 2mo ago
        No complaints from me about for profit insurance companies withholding treatment. They are doing the Lord’s work. We need them. Stephen Helmsley deserves more than $61 million a year.
- 398642258909 2mo ago
  [flagged]
  - czgov 2mo ago
    When a corporation commmits murder it’s good business. When an individual commits murder it’s horrendous. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pprpd3x96o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pprpd3x96o https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0214-chevrons-environmental-crimes-13-years-of-evasion-and-escalation https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0214-chevrons-environmenta...
ck2 2mo ago
vaguely related I was thinking of yet another irony where the orange infant calls datacenters "beautiful" and now is arranging to give them federal land to build on to get around all the protests while at the same time calling solar and wind turbines ugly and loud and giving billions to companies already contracted to NOT build them it's all the irony of wild greed and infinite corruption, if only Aaron could have seen this future
- trvz 2mo ago
  It’s not even greed or corruption – it’s mental illness.
  - chrisweekly 2mo ago
    sadly none of those are mutually exclusive
  - rireads 2mo ago
    Calling it an illness takes away his responsibility while he's very much aware
mukmuk 2mo ago
The attorneys who did this were Carmen Ortiz, Stephen P. Heymann, and Scott Garland. To their everlasting shame.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
lgleason 2mo ago
Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.
- TheqO 2mo ago
  USA never was a democracy, same as many other countries, including UK. These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now. Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1. It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.
buran77 2mo ago
The US has normalized so much moral rot and legal breaches in the past few years, all in the interest of making more money... Rarely does a country degrade so much, so fast, and I'm afraid this isn't even the low mark.
- Razengan 2mo ago
  The real shame is that the next "best" countries are.. China? and the European countries pushing for age verification and sweeping surveillance and apparently bent on destroying the freedoms that made them better than China & Russia.. God can we have an alien invasion already please
  - Gigachad 2mo ago
    Age verification isn’t moral rot even if you disagree with it. The rot is the obvious corruption and legal system that only applies to average people which billionaires constantly violate.
  - jmclnx 2mo ago
    >God can we have an alien invasion already please I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end. As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a case exist.
    - Jskewel 2mo ago
      "there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end" OK doomer
  - whatsThisBtn4 2mo ago
    China? Not sure if Chinese propaganda got you or what. They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up. The United States kills 4 of their own people and the news outlets go wild.
Yizahi 2mo ago
Too small to scrap (c) Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).
touwer 2mo ago
Class justice in optima forma
ionwake 2mo ago
its really sad and doesn't even make much sense, and thats from me just following the story loosely from the uk over the years.
tpmoney 2mo ago
Ok and so what? We have been informed of an injustice, we are now angry. Now what? What do we want? Do we agree that the prosecution was unjust and wrong, celebrate that Meta is not being criminally prosecuted, lash out at the publishers filing the lawsuit and advocate for an official apology from the prosecutors and government that went after Aaron? Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”? Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- quietsignal 2mo ago
  I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no? As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produced by corporate social media explains both its attraction and its resilience in the face of more democratic and emancipatory alternatives.
  - shadowgovt 2mo ago
    Worth noting: this website is not one such alternative.
  - tpmoney 2mo ago
    > I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no? But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him? We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".
imjonse 2mo ago
Aaron Swartz's most famous book recommendation, in a now 20 years old blogpost ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany ), Chomsky's Understanding Power, contains many examples of such cases of those in power, big corporations and the government getting away with crimes. I should probably reread it, even though it can be depressing - but not quite as depressing as Manufacturing Consent. RIP Aaron.
IncreasePosts 2mo ago
Calling him "effectively assassinated" is ridiculous. He was offered a plea deal of 6 months in jail. Which he turned down. And then he killed himself - something which he attempted multiple times in the past when he wasn't being prosecuted for anything
tptacek 2mo ago
I don't think it matters much for the argument, which is valid (or not) regardless of whether you get the precise facts about the Swartz prosecution right, but Swartz was not facing 35 years. That's the statutory maximum sentence you'd get if you ignored the sentencing guidelines and grouped none of the charges, which is not how anything works. The prosecutors threatening Swartz and his attorneys claimed they'd pursue something like 7 years. But Swartz's own (well regarded, well qualified) attorney, writing after his death, when there was ample reason to take shots at the prosecution, believed that even had Swartz lost the case, he'd be unlikely to receive a custodial sentence.
- mindslight 2mo ago
  How many days have you spent in jail or prison? I've done two, and it was weird coming out to freedom. Actual thought taking some of my first steps: "wait, if I want to be over there, I can just start walking?" The guards and fellow jailers were all quite reasonable, too. I can barely imagine facing a whole year. I can't imagine facing five. If there is a point to be made from what you're talking about, it's about how threats of inhumane prison sentences are used to eliminate our right to trial by jury.
  - tptacek 2mo ago
    One of the reasons so many people believe Swartz faced 35 years in prison is that any attempt to correct the record is met by responses like this. Ironically, you're doing the work of the prosecutors for them: this is the whole reason they quote these outlandish and implausible sentencing possibilities in their press releases.
    - mindslight 2mo ago
      By "responses like this" do you mean any form of criticism? What I am calling out is your purely positive statement that lacks any sort of normative judgement. It's the type of thing which helps normalize the status quo, regardless of whether the cudgel is 35 or 7 years. Here is a comment that makes a similar point to yours, but in a constructive manner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992
qarl2 2mo ago
TLDR - the rich get unequal treatment.
- qarl2 2mo ago
  LOL. If justice is blind then why do some lawyers charge so much more than other lawyers? Because they smell really nice?
gsky 2mo ago
What's the point of having democracy when it's working only for the rich?
- infamouscow 2mo ago
  Because it's preferable to what happens when the body politic decides they've had enough, particularly in the US.
gsky 2mo ago
US gov even threatens foreign govs for punishing rough american companies.
firesteelrain 2mo ago
Aren’t the two cases fundamentally different?
- jherdman 2mo ago
  If you’re going to leave a comment like this you need to at least outline your thinking as to why you feel they’re different.
  - Barrin92 2mo ago
    not the OP but the heaviest charges against Swartz didn't stem from his IP infringement, it was wire fraud and computer fraud. He used a network access and MIT guest account he didn't have legal access to because he wasn't affiliated with the institution, which enabled the CFAA charges.
    - watwut 2mo ago
      Expecting the prosecution for HuggingFace incident soon. Or at least full investigation whether it was accident Must be any day now Like common. You know full well that large companies can commit staggering amounts of fraud.
      - 9x39 2mo ago
        Is HuggingFace reaching out to the FBI for assistance to prosecute OpenAI? What does the claim that large companies can commit large frauds have to do with anything?
searealist 2mo ago
Swartz was federally charged with wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act based on allegedly unauthorized access, not simply prosecuted for copyright infringement or “downloading articles.” Also, he was offered a plea deal of 6 months and his own attorneys did not expect him to serve any time even if rejecting the plea deal and convicted. Meta is accused of civil copyright infringement. Very different things.
- shadowgovt 2mo ago
  And, I feel like people really gloss over, perhaps because it is uncomfortable to think about... He took his own life. There is no doubt the government put him in an uncomfortable position, but his story is a gross and tragic outlier. It's hard to draw any patterned conclusions from it, especially because we'll never know how the case would have worked out had Swartz not exited the judicial process.
  - searealist 2mo ago
    Aaron had a history of depression and suicidal ideation that long predates his prosecution. Also: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsk...
    - alex1138 2mo ago
      He did. But it in no way excuses the way they treated him
      - khazhoux 2mo ago
        He was treated poorly. But somehow a lot of otherwise-smart people think you should not charge a person who suffers from depression or suicidal thoughts.
        marysol5 2mo ago
dannyobrien 2mo ago
The best state of affairs is that neither Aaron nor Meta nor anyone else should be targeted for scraping. It shouldn't be a crime. I understand the ire about the injustice, but I don't think the right situation is that because Aaron's case was wrongly pursued, we should somehow enforce that error in the name of consistency.
liendolucas 2mo ago
One of the reasons big companies still get away on things like these is because fines are pocket change to them and top level executives ever face a real prison sentence at all. They have already done the legal work and the math in advance, and because the numbers are on their side they get away with it. Is as simple as that.
alex1138 2mo ago
Arguments exist about how intellectual property needs to go anyway, but FB has always stolen from people, on many levels And furthermore their trackers have always been the most malignant. Stories of "Facebook basically ddosed my site to train their LLMs"
diego_moita 2mo ago
"Rule of the law" is just a lame excuse to "the job of a lawyer is to sell privileges to rich people". In some countries the excuse is lamer than in others. But, in the end, everywhere in the world money always speaks louder.
sillysaurusx 2mo ago
He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.
- PenguinCoder 2mo ago
  Information should be free.
  - aeve890 2mo ago
    What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?
  - MattDamonSpace 2mo ago
    “People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”
    - msftgreed 2mo ago
      You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it. Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
    - 2mo ago
wowczarek 2mo ago
Oh is's never about who did what, it's about who considers whom worth suing at a convenient point in time.
jongjong 2mo ago
The legal system and government these days are mostly tools for oppression of the working class. Most people would be better off without any laws at all and just talking things out with their neighbours, employers and employees; refusing any form of unearned trust or authority. Democracy doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately; nobody has any ideas who they're voting for... Photos can be faked, videos can be faked, candidates can be pre-selected during primaries. Worse than that; each individual is shown different facts so nobody even agrees on the basic facts. So literally people are voting for constructed, imaginary individuals who don't exist outside of their heads. Also, there are too many people voting for too few representatives. This guarantees poor representation. The legal system should be replaced by some kind of vigilante justice hybrid like in the old Roman system were people would be exonerated for taking revenge on just grounds. It's impossible for the legal system to be fair anyway. The closest to justice we can achieve is through decentralization. IMO, the role of government is to dismantle any large organisations which compete against it for power and control and shield individuals against those organisations.
mcv 2mo ago
I recently came to the conclusion that it was never about copyright. It's about corporate control, about punishing contempt for business model. Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. All the kids sued by the MAFIAA were punished because they disrespected a business model. Copyright was merely the mechanism to make it stick. But AI companies and Meta can disrespect copyright all they want, because in their case, it serves a corporate business model, and those hurt or disenfranchised by it are regular people or much smaller companies. The law doesn't exist to protect the weak from the powerful, but to enable the powerful to punish the weak.
- s1artibartfast 2mo ago
  This is pretty close. They attacked the business model, which was an attack on the law itself, which was an attack on the civil structure, which was an attack on everyone who benefits from it. Lots of people have a vested interest in civil structure, from the poor to the rich. Everyone would be worse off if the US looked like Haiti. That said, people benefit in different amounts from the system at Large, and lose or benefit from Individual policies
- pdonis 2mo ago
  > Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. Exactly. And what's more, it's a business model, keeping behind paywalls scientific papers that we the public have already paid for once with our tax dollars, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
- loeg 2mo ago
  What do you think copyright is in service of? It doesn’t exist for its own sake.
  - __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
    It provides a legal justification for censorship. Originally used by The Church to prevent the wrong sort of bible from being printed. It has always been about insulating monopolists and gatekeepers against change. We desperately need to find better ways to pay creators, and it's good that they've managed to put copyright law to some non-nefarious use towards that end. But they deserve something that actually meets their needs, which copyright law does not.
ninjahawk1 2mo ago
I think that large companies having next to no consequences is in large part due to capitalism doing what it does over a long period of time. There’s a deeper and deeper consolidation of money and power the longer time goes on it seems like. If we think back to the various lawsuits Facebook has gone through, they paid out about $10 or so per individual affected, totaling a few hundred million dollars, which they would make in a couple months for selling user data and whatnot. This is something that every company gets away with mainly I think because of just how large their wealth actually is. It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. Punishing an individual is easy. I don’t know if there’s really a solution at this point, maybe we could’ve prevented this reality at some point in the past but I don’t think that without actual global collapse it would be something that can be retroactively changed, and I don’t know if global collapse would necessarily lead to a better future. I think that for one, Zuckerberg should be in prison, if someone oversees a massive theft like this, I think they should be held criminally liable. Same the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI for their parts in the massive theft that took place. They should all be doing prison time. The reason I don’t think they will is that their investors probably have a good amount of leverage over anyone who would prosecute them, so it would never make it that far.
- folkrav 2mo ago
  I mean, total societal collapse would absolutely suck, and there's indeed no guarantee that whatever will replace it won't fall into similar traps eventually, but if things actually are as you describe them, it only can get worse and worse indefinitely, until we get to global collapse anyway.
- DivingForGold 2mo ago
  ZUCK: PUBLIC ENEMY # 1
- deaux 2mo ago
  > It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. It's not at all. There is zero reason this couldn't be applied to Zuck. [0] There's also no reason why fines couldn't be 10% of global revenue, or more. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/evergrande-founder-life-prison.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/evergrande-found...
josefritzishere 2mo ago
The US vs Swartz case was abusive prosecution; lawfare in other words. It was completely out of order with the level of offense.
spongebobstoes 2mo ago
what's the point here? a wrong thing happening to Aaron doesn't mean we should make that same thing happen to Meta
- Lerc 2mo ago
  It seems to be how people view things, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's like the outrage when wealthy people get off on charges. Usually it is because they have the resources to demand the justice that should be afforded to everyone. You shouldn't be outraged at the privileged being treated fairly. You should be outraged at the many many instances of the unprivileged being treated unfairly. Rather than making others suffer to balance things out, removing suffering on the other side has the same effect.
db48x 2mo ago
[dead]
badlibrarian 2mo ago
I don't like talking about this, but first hand knowledge is rarer by the day, and there are entire organizations profiting off this mythology. It's pissing me off. Aaron is not a data point to build stupid metaphors around. He was a bright and broken child. Aaron attracted influential and creepy people and was ill-equipped to handle it. He was also working through a period of sexual awakening while being used by older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw. I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands. It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.
- Melatonic 2mo ago
  Can you give any more details ? I've never heard about this but sad if true
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - talon8635 2mo ago
    There is a great documentary about him (The Internets Own Boy) and a book (The Idealist)
- pdonis 2mo ago
  > I don't like talking about this I can see why it's difficult, but I think your post provides some much-needed context.
- thousand_nights 2mo ago
  > He was a bright and broken child i wasn't there and i didn't know him, but talking about a 26 year old man like this makes it seem like you're just taking away his autonomy
uda 2mo ago
I get the sentiment "Aaron paid while Meta and its likes are getting away", but what will we gain by getting them to pay pennies? We still can't do what Meta is doing, legally, that is the problem We need to repeal anti-circumvention laws, and yes, it means we might legally be able to do to Meta and its likes what they've been doing to all of us
Melatonic 2mo ago
Remember Aaron Swartz !
keeda 2mo ago
A key aspect folks should understand about US Copyright Law is that it much more severely penalizes infringement with distributing, or an intent to distribute, unauthorized copies than to just consume privately. Distributing unauthorized copies is a federal crime (which can escalate to a felony based on various factors) whereas doing whatever for private use is usually a much milder civil liability. If you look at all the much publicized piracy trials around the Napster era, they invariably came down to the defendant distributing the works they downloaded. This explains why the AI giants are legally fine doing what they're doing. They are explicitly not distributing copies of the work they acquired (although Meta apparently torrented some stuff, which seeds i.e. distributes data by default, and so might be in trouble to that extent) and training AI has so far been ruled to be fair use. Which, technically, makes sense; encoding patterns gleaned from billions of texts into weights is clearly different from distributing exact copies, and if you look at the cases where LLMs can be made to regurgitate content verbatim, it only really works for a handful of extremely popular books. This also explains how whatever happened with Aaron Swartz, as tragic as it was, is qualitatively different from what is happening with LLMs. He very explicitly scraped all that content with the specific intention of distributing it. On the other hand, AI companies are literally destroying mountains of books to comply with the law. You could call this tragic on multiple levels, but not hypocritical.
- rpdillon 2mo ago
  > Distributing unauthorized is a federal crime Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call. Aaron Swartz was the victim of a witch hunt, plain and simple. The prosecutor that came after him (Carmen Ortiz) has never suffered any negative consequences for coming after him in such an injust way. She should.
  - keeda 2mo ago
    > Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call. I don't think it's a judgment call, the level to escalate seems to be pretty specific and at an extremely low scale, specifically unauthorized distribution "of at least 10 copies OR 1 or more copyrighted works with a retail value > $2,500" and the penalties are pretty severe, including imprisonment for "up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both." https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1852-copyright-infringement-penalties-17-usc-506a-and-18-usc-2319 https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... I'd say Aaron Swartz had crossed that bar pretty thoroughly.
goldie_wilson 2mo ago
Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't Aaron break into an MIT network closet and then spoof and use exploits to secure data vs Meta who is just scraping everything that can be found on the public web. I despise just about everything Meta does, but it seems like people are quick to compare two situations that are not identical so they can further their "big corp and America = bad" agendas.
- alightsoul 2mo ago
  Oh my god I have seen this argument here repeated so many times with different rephrasings. I do not want to believe it is a bot or astroturfing.
  - xxs 2mo ago
    brand new account and all that...
  - goldie_wilson 2mo ago
    Definitely not a bot. I'm just tired of seeing this community becoming another reddit echo chamber for ideology that is disassociated from reality. The actions here are two completely different cases. You want to talk about whether or not 35 years was appropriate for Aaron's crime, great, that's a valid discussion. If you want to argue whether AI training sets violate fair use, awesome, another completely valid civil law discussion. But thinking that what Aaron did is comparable to Meta scraping is a completely hollow narrative. It relies on total ignorance of what crimes Aaron committed even if he and others believed they were committed for an altruistic reason. Society would collapse if we just ignored crime because the criminal was doing what they thought was a good thing. Furthermore this whole post is using Aaron as a strawman to further the argument that big corporations = bad. While its true that the very nature of a big corporation is to minmax (gaming term if you are unfamiliar) with the max being profit and min being everything else, they are not inherently evil and the argument is an over simplification of a much larger more complex situation. Anyone who simply believes they inherently bad shouldn't be posting online because all of the hardware and services required to do so demonstrates their complacency in contributing to these large corporations and makes them a hypocrite.
Melatonic 2mo ago
So since we're all talking about him I just noticed something odd on his old website. If you go to the full archive of his posts (which seems to be sorted by date) and scroll all the way down to the oldest post there is one at the very bottom that is a bit odd with grammar and was posted in April 2012 - specifically not organised by date like the rest. Link to the full archive: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fullarchive http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fullarchive Link to the out of order post: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity
charlieyu1 2mo ago
He fought for free internet. Today both sides are all trying to kill it.
vbgamer45 2mo ago
This bothers me big time. One my forums got hit by 200k to 280k requests over a 15 minute interval multiple days. I ended up just blocking the whole range /16
vithlani 2mo ago
“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.” ― Honore de Balzac
yieldcrv 2mo ago
do we have a better understanding of mental health on this forum now to both acknowledge the overzealous nature of the prosecution and also view Aaron’s life ending choice as an individual one most people do the time
charcircuit 2mo ago
>we're talking 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and asset forfeiture This is not true. From the prosecutor's testimony: there was never an intention for him to go to jail for longer than a three, four, potentially five-month range.
ropable 2mo ago
I think it's self-evident that that every legal system is both imperfect and unevenly-applied, being a finite resource. It's also a self-evidence truth that money & power buy resistance to the the legal system. It's hard to put a definition on "unfair", but we all recognise it when we see it. That's why the case of Aaron Swartz is so very visceral for most of us.
missedthecue 2mo ago
Weird implication in the headline. The conclusion here isn't that scraping is bad, but that Aaron Swartz was unfairly prosecuted.
gnarbarian 2mo ago
rules are there to serve power
jacquesm 2mo ago
Because he planned to make the data public, Meta just wants to use it to enrich its shareholders. See also: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and every other big player in this space besides.
- yepyeppers 2mo ago
  There’s also the fact that Swartz was physically trespassing and attaching unauthorized machines into networking closets to run scraping on a university network to exfiltrate the scrapes to the public, versus just scraping public facing web from the public web to train a model. That’s a little different and while the feds were heavy-handed against Swartz these computer crime laws were well known and it was less heavy handed than the hacker crackdowns of the 90s if you want to look at precedents.
- derekdahmer 2mo ago
  Meta has opened sourced almost all of their models trained on this data.
  - jacquesm 2mo ago
    But not the training data.
    - derekdahmer 2mo ago
      Not sure what your point is - the articles they trained on are copyrighted and not theirs to open source. The only they can legally open source is the weights, which they have done repeatedly. My point is both Aaron was trying to make the journals public and Meta made models that encapsulate data from the journals public.
  - thomasjeff1 2mo ago
    With added filters (censorship)
elmer2 2mo ago
Aaron broke into a room to setup the system to do the scraping. Much different than scraping web content from the Internet.
- marysol5 2mo ago
  It's also weirdly interesting how people defend Swartz activities, while calling on other people (or corporations) doing it to be prosecuted.
thomasjeff1 2mo ago
BTW Uber broke many laws to kill taxi small business and they got away with it as well.
srj 2mo ago
Carmen Ortiz should have been disbarred over this, it was a shameful episode. Instead she retained her position for years and now is presumably quite wealthy as partner in a prominent Boston law firm.
johnny4000 2mo ago
I didn't know Aaron personally but went to his memorial at Cooper Union. I went because I thought he was one of us. RIP Aaron.
1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago
https://www.wired.com/2009/10/swartz-fbi/ https://www.wired.com/2009/10/swartz-fbi/ It's possible the JSTOR charges were in some way motivated by the earlier PACER incident In the JSTOR case he installed a python script on his own laptop, connected it to MIT's network and left the script running for months In the PACER case, the computer he used did not belong to him. It was a government computer in a federal building primarily used by lawyers. He installed a perl script on the government's computer and left it running for weeks It does not appear he ever asked anyone for permission to do this It's surprising he avoided CFAA charges for the PACER incident Did he exceed authorized access to a "protected computer" For purposes of the CFAA it does not matter if the documents were public information Perhaps there are libraries that welcome patrons installing scripts on their publicly accessible computers without permission, then leaving the scripts running on their networks, downloading 1000's of documents Maybe MIT would not care. But there is every reason to believe the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals would care This is not to suggest he deserved his fate, only that the PACER incident mattered. Perhaps more than the JSTOR one The blog author does not mention it
fulafel 2mo ago
Aaron's case was wrong, but we shouldn't turn coats about "information wants to be free" just because it's gaining more momentum? It would be petty and counterproductive to do it just for consistency of enforcing the wrongness.
yourselfyoudesc 2mo ago
[flagged]
tzs 2mo ago
98% of the commenters here have no idea what Swartz was actually charged with, or what he actually did. Here are a couple of articles that cover this from an expert in the relevant areas of law [1] [2]. Also, due to the very stupid way the DoJ calculates potential sentences in their press releases, almost everyone thinks defendants are facing much more prison time than they actually have any remotely realistic chance of receiving. Here's an article on that [3]. Briefly, if some hypothetical criminal committed some specific crime in the worst way possible, hitting many of the checkmarks that make it worse (such underage victim, victim is a law or government official or relative of one, victim was restrained, hate crime, terrorism, organized crime was involved, they were a manager or supervisor in that organized crime, they abuse a position of trust, they used a minor to help with the crime, they used threats to impede the investigation, they committed reckless endangerment while fleeing arrest, and the crime was committed while they were out on bond or bail from another federal crime) and could get a sentence of N years then N years is what the DoJ states in the press release. Doesn't matter that the actual person being charged has none of those, or that they have some of the circumstances that can lower sentences (such as acceptance of responsibility, only minor involvement, helped investigating or prosecuting another person, diminished capacity, they self reported their crime before authorities discover it, they were coerced into participating, and some more) and there's basically no chance they will get anything more than maybe a few months of parole...it is going to say N years in the press releases. Actually, it might even say some multiple of N, because they often charge the person with multiple things based on the same underlying harm. For example if you kill one person that might be first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter. They might charge you with all of those (which does make sense--they are going to try to prove all the elements of first degree murder, but if they fail to prove of them they might still prove the elements of one of the others). If the jury comes back and convicts on several of them all but the most severe one will be used for sentencing. But the DoJ press release will probable make it sounds like you could serve N years for each of them. It's completely ridiculous. They have the details of what they are charging the person with. They know about all those factors that increase or decrease sentences. They could do the math and give a realistic sentence in the press release. [1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ [2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/ https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
account42 2mo ago
This is really a problem with companies vs. individuals breaking laws in general. There is a perverse incentive for prosecutors to not go after companies unless they have an airtight case because a company will be able to afford to defend themselves with an army of lawyers and even if they cannot win they will drag out the case. Meanwhile individuals can be pressured into accepting a plea deal with much flimsier evidence because the potential consequences can be life altering.
SZJX 2mo ago
There's a Chinese saying from more than 2000 years ago: When one steals a weapon, they are executed; when one steals a country, they become a king. How the world has always worked, sadly, ha.
Zambyte 2mo ago
> Swartz' use case was the dissemination and archival of knowledge; Meta's use case is powering up their proprietary plagiarism code It's hard to imagine a world where Aaron is still around, and he is not a huge fan of LLMs. He'd probably be writing software to make local inference as accessible as possible. I have personally made the same parallel between the treatment of Aaron and the behavior of modern AI studios, but I believe the better conclusion to arrive at is that we should abolish copyright, since it is a fundamentally unjust system designed by people in power, for people in power. Not that we should be litigiously bullying AI scientists into suicide the same way as was done to Aaron.
elmer2 2mo ago
The difference is that companies can either sue or contact Meta to get the content removed (this happens every day) This isn't possible when you break into a computer room and steal their files. The mental gymnaistics people go through to support an asshole that just did what he felt like and wouldn't work witin the system is astounding. Aaron Swartz should have started a company that supported the free flow of journalim/information. Instead, he chose to act like a child and steal it instead. While his death is tragic, he's not someone we should be supporting.
hnfong 2mo ago
Might be weird to make this comment on a YC hosted forum, but cases like these made me realize understand why startups like to bring in "investors" with some political clout. Not for the money per se, but for... like... "protection". I mean, of course they're not going to sue Meta (or the other big AI players), but if you're a startup, it probably helps to have someone with influence as an investor so maybe authorities would give your company some slack.
pickdig 2mo ago
...and still fails to win the ai race at least for now
elproxy 2mo ago
« selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir » "The laws on little culprits fall;/ Great criminals escape them all." Nothing new since 1678 it seems

1704 points by speckx 2mo ago

“ The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” is a must watch documentary.

spelk 2mo ago

In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far, but I honestly wish these could be used to prosecute people who are treated differently for the same crime because of their status, or at least set a precedent that such activities are definitively okay.

bigfatkitten 2mo ago
In Australia at least, the Director of Public Prosecutions has the power to take over the matter, and they often do. They can then do one of two things. They can either continue running it if it’s in the interests of justice to do so (public interest, reasonable prospects of success etc), or they can shut it down, as they tend to do for sovereign citizen nonsense and the like.
- darreninthenet 2mo ago
  Same in the UK
amiga386 2mo ago
> In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far This is what happens when they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal > Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides. Hundreds of innocent people went to prison, were financially ruined, thirteen took their own life, because a well-funded entity found it easier to privately prosecute its contractors than to question its software vendor. And the court system let them do it.
- quickthrowman 2mo ago
  For some insane reason I am unable to comprehend, the UK government still allows Fujitsu to bid on government software contracts, despite being responsible for all of the false imprisonments, trauma, and tragedy you laid you in your post. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-government-contracts-121704565.html https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-govern...
  - pkaye 2mo ago
    I have a feeling Fujitsu took the blame for mistakes done by the Post Office in order to get future contracts. The contracts are padded to pay fines and damages.
  - amiga386 2mo ago
    I understand the government would have difficulty excluding Fujitsu under its own procurement regulations at the time (Public Contracts Regulations 2015). Fujitsu voluntarily withdrew its bids in 2024. The goverment passed the Procurement Act 2023 which came into force in February 2025 and there is now a national debarment list, though I note Fujitsu isn't on it. Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its own subpostmasters.
qingcharles 2mo ago
Some areas of the USA still allow it too, but it's rare.
wahern 2mo ago
Some US states still have private criminal prosecutions. > Second, this Article demonstrates that the government monopoly on prosecution is an ideology rather than a rule. As it turns out, the government has never had total control over criminal law enforcement—not even exclusive authority to charge someone with a crime. While some courts prohibited private prosecution in the nineteenth century, others refused to abolish the practice. Public prosecutions of felonies and federal offenses became the norm in the progressive era, but private prosecution persisted in various forms. Particularly in “lowly” municipal courts, private individuals retained the ability to file and litigate criminal cases. -- The Past and Persistence of Private Prosecution, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5210126 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5210126
gib444 2mo ago
In England, private prosecutions are used regularly by the railway. The threat of prosecution lets them do a shakedown to extract sums from people It was less bizarre when they were all private companies, but now many are owned by the government! Some of them have successfully prosecuted people over a £0 difference in fare

milkytron 2mo ago

The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him. There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever). Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals. The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole. RIP Aaron.

jampekka 2mo ago
JSTOR dropped civil litigation only after getting about $25k in the settlement from him.
PearlRiver 2mo ago
Is that not how it always goes? Robbing a bank got you in jail a lot longer than assaulting a woman.
bigfatkitten 2mo ago
And even then, it wasn’t really about justice but more for the prosecutor, Carmen Ortiz’s career advancement. The case ultimately did not help her in her run for governor of MA.
- DoctorOetker 2mo ago
  the blood of a prodigy as status symbol make-up
- IncreasePosts 2mo ago
  How does prosecuting someone who downloaded articles in a broom closet help her career advancement?
  - bitwize 2mo ago

cucumber3732842 2mo ago

If you cut down a couple acres of forest you own because you want to have a hay field or whatever you're <screech> violating federal environmental law <screech> But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things on their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local commissioner. What happened to Aaron Swartz is little different.

czgov 2mo ago

[flagged]

HDThoreaun 2mo ago
This country's lack of death panels is one of the biggest contributors to our heinously overpriced healthcare system. Insurers stopping doctors from prescribing shit that doesnt work is literally the only thing keeping costs down in the entire system.
- czgov 2mo ago
  Ah yes. Those health insurance companies are doing God’s working protecting us all. They have no part in why our system is heinously overpriced as you put it.
  - HDThoreaun 2mo ago
    Of course there are plenty of complaints to be made about insurers. The death panels aren’t one of them though. Mangione had a horrible, incurable back issue, and wanted an expensive experimental treatment that wouldn’t work. It was good that he was told no, if only to stop him from getting his hopes up. The rest of us not getting scammed is nice too.
    - czgov 2mo ago
      No complaints from me about for profit insurance companies withholding treatment. They are doing the Lord’s work. We need them. Stephen Helmsley deserves more than $61 million a year.
398642258909 2mo ago
[flagged]
- czgov 2mo ago
  When a corporation commmits murder it’s good business. When an individual commits murder it’s horrendous. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pprpd3x96o https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pprpd3x96o https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0214-chevrons-environmental-crimes-13-years-of-evasion-and-escalation https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0214-chevrons-environmenta...

ck2 2mo ago

vaguely related I was thinking of yet another irony where the orange infant calls datacenters "beautiful" and now is arranging to give them federal land to build on to get around all the protests while at the same time calling solar and wind turbines ugly and loud and giving billions to companies already contracted to NOT build them it's all the irony of wild greed and infinite corruption, if only Aaron could have seen this future

trvz 2mo ago
It’s not even greed or corruption – it’s mental illness.
- chrisweekly 2mo ago
  sadly none of those are mutually exclusive
- rireads 2mo ago
  Calling it an illness takes away his responsibility while he's very much aware

mukmuk 2mo ago

The attorneys who did this were Carmen Ortiz, Stephen P. Heymann, and Scott Garland. To their everlasting shame.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]

lgleason 2mo ago

Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.

TheqO 2mo ago
USA never was a democracy, same as many other countries, including UK. These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now. Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1. It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.

buran77 2mo ago

The US has normalized so much moral rot and legal breaches in the past few years, all in the interest of making more money... Rarely does a country degrade so much, so fast, and I'm afraid this isn't even the low mark.

Razengan 2mo ago
The real shame is that the next "best" countries are.. China? and the European countries pushing for age verification and sweeping surveillance and apparently bent on destroying the freedoms that made them better than China & Russia.. God can we have an alien invasion already please
- Gigachad 2mo ago
  Age verification isn’t moral rot even if you disagree with it. The rot is the obvious corruption and legal system that only applies to average people which billionaires constantly violate.
- jmclnx 2mo ago
  >God can we have an alien invasion already please I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end. As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a case exist.
  - Jskewel 2mo ago
    "there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end" OK doomer
- whatsThisBtn4 2mo ago
  China? Not sure if Chinese propaganda got you or what. They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up. The United States kills 4 of their own people and the news outlets go wild.

Yizahi 2mo ago

Too small to scrap (c) Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).

touwer 2mo ago

Class justice in optima forma

ionwake 2mo ago

its really sad and doesn't even make much sense, and thats from me just following the story loosely from the uk over the years.

tpmoney 2mo ago

Ok and so what? We have been informed of an injustice, we are now angry. Now what? What do we want? Do we agree that the prosecution was unjust and wrong, celebrate that Meta is not being criminally prosecuted, lash out at the publishers filing the lawsuit and advocate for an official apology from the prosecutors and government that went after Aaron? Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”? Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
quietsignal 2mo ago
I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no? As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produced by corporate social media explains both its attraction and its resilience in the face of more democratic and emancipatory alternatives.
- shadowgovt 2mo ago
  Worth noting: this website is not one such alternative.
- tpmoney 2mo ago
  > I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no? But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him? We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".

imjonse 2mo ago

Aaron Swartz's most famous book recommendation, in a now 20 years old blogpost ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany ), Chomsky's Understanding Power, contains many examples of such cases of those in power, big corporations and the government getting away with crimes. I should probably reread it, even though it can be depressing - but not quite as depressing as Manufacturing Consent. RIP Aaron.

IncreasePosts 2mo ago

Calling him "effectively assassinated" is ridiculous. He was offered a plea deal of 6 months in jail. Which he turned down. And then he killed himself - something which he attempted multiple times in the past when he wasn't being prosecuted for anything

tptacek 2mo ago

I don't think it matters much for the argument, which is valid (or not) regardless of whether you get the precise facts about the Swartz prosecution right, but Swartz was not facing 35 years. That's the statutory maximum sentence you'd get if you ignored the sentencing guidelines and grouped none of the charges, which is not how anything works. The prosecutors threatening Swartz and his attorneys claimed they'd pursue something like 7 years. But Swartz's own (well regarded, well qualified) attorney, writing after his death, when there was ample reason to take shots at the prosecution, believed that even had Swartz lost the case, he'd be unlikely to receive a custodial sentence.

mindslight 2mo ago
How many days have you spent in jail or prison? I've done two, and it was weird coming out to freedom. Actual thought taking some of my first steps: "wait, if I want to be over there, I can just start walking?" The guards and fellow jailers were all quite reasonable, too. I can barely imagine facing a whole year. I can't imagine facing five. If there is a point to be made from what you're talking about, it's about how threats of inhumane prison sentences are used to eliminate our right to trial by jury.
- tptacek 2mo ago
  One of the reasons so many people believe Swartz faced 35 years in prison is that any attempt to correct the record is met by responses like this. Ironically, you're doing the work of the prosecutors for them: this is the whole reason they quote these outlandish and implausible sentencing possibilities in their press releases.
  - mindslight 2mo ago
    By "responses like this" do you mean any form of criticism? What I am calling out is your purely positive statement that lacks any sort of normative judgement. It's the type of thing which helps normalize the status quo, regardless of whether the cudgel is 35 or 7 years. Here is a comment that makes a similar point to yours, but in a constructive manner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992

qarl2 2mo ago

TLDR - the rich get unequal treatment.

qarl2 2mo ago
LOL. If justice is blind then why do some lawyers charge so much more than other lawyers? Because they smell really nice?

gsky 2mo ago

What's the point of having democracy when it's working only for the rich?

infamouscow 2mo ago
Because it's preferable to what happens when the body politic decides they've had enough, particularly in the US.

gsky 2mo ago

US gov even threatens foreign govs for punishing rough american companies.

firesteelrain 2mo ago

Aren’t the two cases fundamentally different?

jherdman 2mo ago
If you’re going to leave a comment like this you need to at least outline your thinking as to why you feel they’re different.
- Barrin92 2mo ago
  not the OP but the heaviest charges against Swartz didn't stem from his IP infringement, it was wire fraud and computer fraud. He used a network access and MIT guest account he didn't have legal access to because he wasn't affiliated with the institution, which enabled the CFAA charges.
  - watwut 2mo ago
    Expecting the prosecution for HuggingFace incident soon. Or at least full investigation whether it was accident Must be any day now Like common. You know full well that large companies can commit staggering amounts of fraud.
    - 9x39 2mo ago
      Is HuggingFace reaching out to the FBI for assistance to prosecute OpenAI? What does the claim that large companies can commit large frauds have to do with anything?

searealist 2mo ago

Swartz was federally charged with wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act based on allegedly unauthorized access, not simply prosecuted for copyright infringement or “downloading articles.” Also, he was offered a plea deal of 6 months and his own attorneys did not expect him to serve any time even if rejecting the plea deal and convicted. Meta is accused of civil copyright infringement. Very different things.

shadowgovt 2mo ago
And, I feel like people really gloss over, perhaps because it is uncomfortable to think about... He took his own life. There is no doubt the government put him in an uncomfortable position, but his story is a gross and tragic outlier. It's hard to draw any patterned conclusions from it, especially because we'll never know how the case would have worked out had Swartz not exited the judicial process.
- searealist 2mo ago
  Aaron had a history of depression and suicidal ideation that long predates his prosecution. Also: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsky-killed-aaron-swartz/ https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsk...
  - alex1138 2mo ago
    He did. But it in no way excuses the way they treated him
    - khazhoux 2mo ago
      He was treated poorly. But somehow a lot of otherwise-smart people think you should not charge a person who suffers from depression or suicidal thoughts.
      - marysol5 2mo ago

dannyobrien 2mo ago

The best state of affairs is that neither Aaron nor Meta nor anyone else should be targeted for scraping. It shouldn't be a crime. I understand the ire about the injustice, but I don't think the right situation is that because Aaron's case was wrongly pursued, we should somehow enforce that error in the name of consistency.

liendolucas 2mo ago

One of the reasons big companies still get away on things like these is because fines are pocket change to them and top level executives ever face a real prison sentence at all. They have already done the legal work and the math in advance, and because the numbers are on their side they get away with it. Is as simple as that.

alex1138 2mo ago

Arguments exist about how intellectual property needs to go anyway, but FB has always stolen from people, on many levels And furthermore their trackers have always been the most malignant. Stories of "Facebook basically ddosed my site to train their LLMs"

diego_moita 2mo ago

"Rule of the law" is just a lame excuse to "the job of a lawyer is to sell privileges to rich people". In some countries the excuse is lamer than in others. But, in the end, everywhere in the world money always speaks louder.

sillysaurusx 2mo ago

He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.

PenguinCoder 2mo ago
Information should be free.
- aeve890 2mo ago
  What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?
- MattDamonSpace 2mo ago
  “People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”
  - msftgreed 2mo ago
    You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it. Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
  - 2mo ago

wowczarek 2mo ago

Oh is's never about who did what, it's about who considers whom worth suing at a convenient point in time.

jongjong 2mo ago

The legal system and government these days are mostly tools for oppression of the working class. Most people would be better off without any laws at all and just talking things out with their neighbours, employers and employees; refusing any form of unearned trust or authority. Democracy doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately; nobody has any ideas who they're voting for... Photos can be faked, videos can be faked, candidates can be pre-selected during primaries. Worse than that; each individual is shown different facts so nobody even agrees on the basic facts. So literally people are voting for constructed, imaginary individuals who don't exist outside of their heads. Also, there are too many people voting for too few representatives. This guarantees poor representation. The legal system should be replaced by some kind of vigilante justice hybrid like in the old Roman system were people would be exonerated for taking revenge on just grounds. It's impossible for the legal system to be fair anyway. The closest to justice we can achieve is through decentralization. IMO, the role of government is to dismantle any large organisations which compete against it for power and control and shield individuals against those organisations.

mcv 2mo ago

I recently came to the conclusion that it was never about copyright. It's about corporate control, about punishing contempt for business model. Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. All the kids sued by the MAFIAA were punished because they disrespected a business model. Copyright was merely the mechanism to make it stick. But AI companies and Meta can disrespect copyright all they want, because in their case, it serves a corporate business model, and those hurt or disenfranchised by it are regular people or much smaller companies. The law doesn't exist to protect the weak from the powerful, but to enable the powerful to punish the weak.

s1artibartfast 2mo ago
This is pretty close. They attacked the business model, which was an attack on the law itself, which was an attack on the civil structure, which was an attack on everyone who benefits from it. Lots of people have a vested interest in civil structure, from the poor to the rich. Everyone would be worse off if the US looked like Haiti. That said, people benefit in different amounts from the system at Large, and lose or benefit from Individual policies
pdonis 2mo ago
> Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. Exactly. And what's more, it's a business model, keeping behind paywalls scientific papers that we the public have already paid for once with our tax dollars, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
loeg 2mo ago
What do you think copyright is in service of? It doesn’t exist for its own sake.
- __MatrixMan__ 2mo ago
  It provides a legal justification for censorship. Originally used by The Church to prevent the wrong sort of bible from being printed. It has always been about insulating monopolists and gatekeepers against change. We desperately need to find better ways to pay creators, and it's good that they've managed to put copyright law to some non-nefarious use towards that end. But they deserve something that actually meets their needs, which copyright law does not.

ninjahawk1 2mo ago

I think that large companies having next to no consequences is in large part due to capitalism doing what it does over a long period of time. There’s a deeper and deeper consolidation of money and power the longer time goes on it seems like. If we think back to the various lawsuits Facebook has gone through, they paid out about $10 or so per individual affected, totaling a few hundred million dollars, which they would make in a couple months for selling user data and whatnot. This is something that every company gets away with mainly I think because of just how large their wealth actually is. It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. Punishing an individual is easy. I don’t know if there’s really a solution at this point, maybe we could’ve prevented this reality at some point in the past but I don’t think that without actual global collapse it would be something that can be retroactively changed, and I don’t know if global collapse would necessarily lead to a better future. I think that for one, Zuckerberg should be in prison, if someone oversees a massive theft like this, I think they should be held criminally liable. Same the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI for their parts in the massive theft that took place. They should all be doing prison time. The reason I don’t think they will is that their investors probably have a good amount of leverage over anyone who would prosecute them, so it would never make it that far.

folkrav 2mo ago
I mean, total societal collapse would absolutely suck, and there's indeed no guarantee that whatever will replace it won't fall into similar traps eventually, but if things actually are as you describe them, it only can get worse and worse indefinitely, until we get to global collapse anyway.
DivingForGold 2mo ago
ZUCK: PUBLIC ENEMY # 1
deaux 2mo ago
> It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. It's not at all. There is zero reason this couldn't be applied to Zuck. [0] There's also no reason why fines couldn't be 10% of global revenue, or more. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/evergrande-founder-life-prison.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/evergrande-found...

josefritzishere 2mo ago

The US vs Swartz case was abusive prosecution; lawfare in other words. It was completely out of order with the level of offense.

spongebobstoes 2mo ago

what's the point here? a wrong thing happening to Aaron doesn't mean we should make that same thing happen to Meta

Lerc 2mo ago
It seems to be how people view things, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's like the outrage when wealthy people get off on charges. Usually it is because they have the resources to demand the justice that should be afforded to everyone. You shouldn't be outraged at the privileged being treated fairly. You should be outraged at the many many instances of the unprivileged being treated unfairly. Rather than making others suffer to balance things out, removing suffering on the other side has the same effect.

db48x 2mo ago

[dead]

badlibrarian 2mo ago

I don't like talking about this, but first hand knowledge is rarer by the day, and there are entire organizations profiting off this mythology. It's pissing me off. Aaron is not a data point to build stupid metaphors around. He was a bright and broken child. Aaron attracted influential and creepy people and was ill-equipped to handle it. He was also working through a period of sexual awakening while being used by older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw. I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands. It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.

Melatonic 2mo ago
Can you give any more details ? I've never heard about this but sad if true
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- talon8635 2mo ago
  There is a great documentary about him (The Internets Own Boy) and a book (The Idealist)
pdonis 2mo ago
> I don't like talking about this I can see why it's difficult, but I think your post provides some much-needed context.
thousand_nights 2mo ago
> He was a bright and broken child i wasn't there and i didn't know him, but talking about a 26 year old man like this makes it seem like you're just taking away his autonomy

uda 2mo ago

I get the sentiment "Aaron paid while Meta and its likes are getting away", but what will we gain by getting them to pay pennies? We still can't do what Meta is doing, legally, that is the problem We need to repeal anti-circumvention laws, and yes, it means we might legally be able to do to Meta and its likes what they've been doing to all of us

Melatonic 2mo ago

Remember Aaron Swartz !

keeda 2mo ago

A key aspect folks should understand about US Copyright Law is that it much more severely penalizes infringement with distributing, or an intent to distribute, unauthorized copies than to just consume privately. Distributing unauthorized copies is a federal crime (which can escalate to a felony based on various factors) whereas doing whatever for private use is usually a much milder civil liability. If you look at all the much publicized piracy trials around the Napster era, they invariably came down to the defendant distributing the works they downloaded. This explains why the AI giants are legally fine doing what they're doing. They are explicitly not distributing copies of the work they acquired (although Meta apparently torrented some stuff, which seeds i.e. distributes data by default, and so might be in trouble to that extent) and training AI has so far been ruled to be fair use. Which, technically, makes sense; encoding patterns gleaned from billions of texts into weights is clearly different from distributing exact copies, and if you look at the cases where LLMs can be made to regurgitate content verbatim, it only really works for a handful of extremely popular books. This also explains how whatever happened with Aaron Swartz, as tragic as it was, is qualitatively different from what is happening with LLMs. He very explicitly scraped all that content with the specific intention of distributing it. On the other hand, AI companies are literally destroying mountains of books to comply with the law. You could call this tragic on multiple levels, but not hypocritical.

rpdillon 2mo ago
> Distributing unauthorized is a federal crime Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call. Aaron Swartz was the victim of a witch hunt, plain and simple. The prosecutor that came after him (Carmen Ortiz) has never suffered any negative consequences for coming after him in such an injust way. She should.
- keeda 2mo ago
  > Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call. I don't think it's a judgment call, the level to escalate seems to be pretty specific and at an extremely low scale, specifically unauthorized distribution "of at least 10 copies OR 1 or more copyrighted works with a retail value > $2,500" and the penalties are pretty severe, including imprisonment for "up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both." https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual-1852-copyright-infringement-penalties-17-usc-506a-and-18-usc-2319 https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual... I'd say Aaron Swartz had crossed that bar pretty thoroughly.

goldie_wilson 2mo ago

Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't Aaron break into an MIT network closet and then spoof and use exploits to secure data vs Meta who is just scraping everything that can be found on the public web. I despise just about everything Meta does, but it seems like people are quick to compare two situations that are not identical so they can further their "big corp and America = bad" agendas.

alightsoul 2mo ago
Oh my god I have seen this argument here repeated so many times with different rephrasings. I do not want to believe it is a bot or astroturfing.
- xxs 2mo ago
  brand new account and all that...
- goldie_wilson 2mo ago
  Definitely not a bot. I'm just tired of seeing this community becoming another reddit echo chamber for ideology that is disassociated from reality. The actions here are two completely different cases. You want to talk about whether or not 35 years was appropriate for Aaron's crime, great, that's a valid discussion. If you want to argue whether AI training sets violate fair use, awesome, another completely valid civil law discussion. But thinking that what Aaron did is comparable to Meta scraping is a completely hollow narrative. It relies on total ignorance of what crimes Aaron committed even if he and others believed they were committed for an altruistic reason. Society would collapse if we just ignored crime because the criminal was doing what they thought was a good thing. Furthermore this whole post is using Aaron as a strawman to further the argument that big corporations = bad. While its true that the very nature of a big corporation is to minmax (gaming term if you are unfamiliar) with the max being profit and min being everything else, they are not inherently evil and the argument is an over simplification of a much larger more complex situation. Anyone who simply believes they inherently bad shouldn't be posting online because all of the hardware and services required to do so demonstrates their complacency in contributing to these large corporations and makes them a hypocrite.

Melatonic 2mo ago

So since we're all talking about him I just noticed something odd on his old website. If you go to the full archive of his posts (which seems to be sorted by date) and scroll all the way down to the oldest post there is one at the very bottom that is a bit odd with grammar and was posted in April 2012 - specifically not organised by date like the rest. Link to the full archive: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fullarchive http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fullarchive Link to the out of order post: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity

charlieyu1 2mo ago

He fought for free internet. Today both sides are all trying to kill it.

vbgamer45 2mo ago

This bothers me big time. One my forums got hit by 200k to 280k requests over a 15 minute interval multiple days. I ended up just blocking the whole range /16

vithlani 2mo ago

“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.” ― Honore de Balzac

yieldcrv 2mo ago

do we have a better understanding of mental health on this forum now to both acknowledge the overzealous nature of the prosecution and also view Aaron’s life ending choice as an individual one most people do the time

charcircuit 2mo ago

>we're talking 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and asset forfeiture This is not true. From the prosecutor's testimony: there was never an intention for him to go to jail for longer than a three, four, potentially five-month range.

ropable 2mo ago

I think it's self-evident that that every legal system is both imperfect and unevenly-applied, being a finite resource. It's also a self-evidence truth that money & power buy resistance to the the legal system. It's hard to put a definition on "unfair", but we all recognise it when we see it. That's why the case of Aaron Swartz is so very visceral for most of us.

missedthecue 2mo ago

Weird implication in the headline. The conclusion here isn't that scraping is bad, but that Aaron Swartz was unfairly prosecuted.

gnarbarian 2mo ago

rules are there to serve power

jacquesm 2mo ago

Because he planned to make the data public, Meta just wants to use it to enrich its shareholders. See also: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and every other big player in this space besides.

yepyeppers 2mo ago
There’s also the fact that Swartz was physically trespassing and attaching unauthorized machines into networking closets to run scraping on a university network to exfiltrate the scrapes to the public, versus just scraping public facing web from the public web to train a model. That’s a little different and while the feds were heavy-handed against Swartz these computer crime laws were well known and it was less heavy handed than the hacker crackdowns of the 90s if you want to look at precedents.
derekdahmer 2mo ago
Meta has opened sourced almost all of their models trained on this data.
- jacquesm 2mo ago
  But not the training data.
  - derekdahmer 2mo ago
    Not sure what your point is - the articles they trained on are copyrighted and not theirs to open source. The only they can legally open source is the weights, which they have done repeatedly. My point is both Aaron was trying to make the journals public and Meta made models that encapsulate data from the journals public.
- thomasjeff1 2mo ago
  With added filters (censorship)

elmer2 2mo ago

Aaron broke into a room to setup the system to do the scraping. Much different than scraping web content from the Internet.

marysol5 2mo ago
It's also weirdly interesting how people defend Swartz activities, while calling on other people (or corporations) doing it to be prosecuted.

thomasjeff1 2mo ago

BTW Uber broke many laws to kill taxi small business and they got away with it as well.

srj 2mo ago

Carmen Ortiz should have been disbarred over this, it was a shameful episode. Instead she retained her position for years and now is presumably quite wealthy as partner in a prominent Boston law firm.

johnny4000 2mo ago

I didn't know Aaron personally but went to his memorial at Cooper Union. I went because I thought he was one of us. RIP Aaron.

1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago

https://www.wired.com/2009/10/swartz-fbi/ https://www.wired.com/2009/10/swartz-fbi/ It's possible the JSTOR charges were in some way motivated by the earlier PACER incident In the JSTOR case he installed a python script on his own laptop, connected it to MIT's network and left the script running for months In the PACER case, the computer he used did not belong to him. It was a government computer in a federal building primarily used by lawyers. He installed a perl script on the government's computer and left it running for weeks It does not appear he ever asked anyone for permission to do this It's surprising he avoided CFAA charges for the PACER incident Did he exceed authorized access to a "protected computer" For purposes of the CFAA it does not matter if the documents were public information Perhaps there are libraries that welcome patrons installing scripts on their publicly accessible computers without permission, then leaving the scripts running on their networks, downloading 1000's of documents Maybe MIT would not care. But there is every reason to believe the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals would care This is not to suggest he deserved his fate, only that the PACER incident mattered. Perhaps more than the JSTOR one The blog author does not mention it

fulafel 2mo ago

Aaron's case was wrong, but we shouldn't turn coats about "information wants to be free" just because it's gaining more momentum? It would be petty and counterproductive to do it just for consistency of enforcing the wrongness.

yourselfyoudesc 2mo ago

[flagged]

tzs 2mo ago

98% of the commenters here have no idea what Swartz was actually charged with, or what he actually did. Here are a couple of articles that cover this from an expert in the relevant areas of law [1] [2]. Also, due to the very stupid way the DoJ calculates potential sentences in their press releases, almost everyone thinks defendants are facing much more prison time than they actually have any remotely realistic chance of receiving. Here's an article on that [3]. Briefly, if some hypothetical criminal committed some specific crime in the worst way possible, hitting many of the checkmarks that make it worse (such underage victim, victim is a law or government official or relative of one, victim was restrained, hate crime, terrorism, organized crime was involved, they were a manager or supervisor in that organized crime, they abuse a position of trust, they used a minor to help with the crime, they used threats to impede the investigation, they committed reckless endangerment while fleeing arrest, and the crime was committed while they were out on bond or bail from another federal crime) and could get a sentence of N years then N years is what the DoJ states in the press release. Doesn't matter that the actual person being charged has none of those, or that they have some of the circumstances that can lower sentences (such as acceptance of responsibility, only minor involvement, helped investigating or prosecuting another person, diminished capacity, they self reported their crime before authorities discover it, they were coerced into participating, and some more) and there's basically no chance they will get anything more than maybe a few months of parole...it is going to say N years in the press releases. Actually, it might even say some multiple of N, because they often charge the person with multiple things based on the same underlying harm. For example if you kill one person that might be first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter. They might charge you with all of those (which does make sense--they are going to try to prove all the elements of first degree murder, but if they fail to prove of them they might still prove the elements of one of the others). If the jury comes back and convicts on several of them all but the most severe one will be used for sentencing. But the DoJ press release will probable make it sounds like you could serve N years for each of them. It's completely ridiculous. They have the details of what they are charging the person with. They know about all those factors that increase or decrease sentences. They could do the math and give a realistic sentence in the press release. [1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ [2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/ https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a... [3] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popehat.com/2013/02/05/crime-whale-sushi-sentence-eleventy-million-years/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...

account42 2mo ago

This is really a problem with companies vs. individuals breaking laws in general. There is a perverse incentive for prosecutors to not go after companies unless they have an airtight case because a company will be able to afford to defend themselves with an army of lawyers and even if they cannot win they will drag out the case. Meanwhile individuals can be pressured into accepting a plea deal with much flimsier evidence because the potential consequences can be life altering.

SZJX 2mo ago

There's a Chinese saying from more than 2000 years ago: When one steals a weapon, they are executed; when one steals a country, they become a king. How the world has always worked, sadly, ha.

Zambyte 2mo ago

> Swartz' use case was the dissemination and archival of knowledge; Meta's use case is powering up their proprietary plagiarism code It's hard to imagine a world where Aaron is still around, and he is not a huge fan of LLMs. He'd probably be writing software to make local inference as accessible as possible. I have personally made the same parallel between the treatment of Aaron and the behavior of modern AI studios, but I believe the better conclusion to arrive at is that we should abolish copyright, since it is a fundamentally unjust system designed by people in power, for people in power. Not that we should be litigiously bullying AI scientists into suicide the same way as was done to Aaron.

elmer2 2mo ago

The difference is that companies can either sue or contact Meta to get the content removed (this happens every day) This isn't possible when you break into a computer room and steal their files. The mental gymnaistics people go through to support an asshole that just did what he felt like and wouldn't work witin the system is astounding. Aaron Swartz should have started a company that supported the free flow of journalim/information. Instead, he chose to act like a child and steal it instead. While his death is tragic, he's not someone we should be supporting.

hnfong 2mo ago

Might be weird to make this comment on a YC hosted forum, but cases like these made me realize understand why startups like to bring in "investors" with some political clout. Not for the money per se, but for... like... "protection". I mean, of course they're not going to sue Meta (or the other big AI players), but if you're a startup, it probably helps to have someone with influence as an investor so maybe authorities would give your company some slack.

pickdig 2mo ago

...and still fails to win the ai race at least for now

elproxy 2mo ago

« selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir » "The laws on little culprits fall;/ Great criminals escape them all." Nothing new since 1678 it seems