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The problem is not that Aaron accessed the information; it is that he abused the public resources used to maintain the store of information, and further that he
by rprasad 14y ago
The problem is not that Aaron accessed the information; it is that he abused the public resources used to maintain the store of information, and further that he did so in such an egregious matter. He would not have been prosecuted if he had just downloaded a dozen articles, but he downloaded 4 million.
- ghshephard 14y ago4 million, 40 million - it's just bytes on a wire. I web scraped 35,000 articles from the AJCN recently, about 11 Gigabytes worth. I didn't ask permission - I just checked to see if my $10 temporary AJCN account could do it and set up an awk script generate the appropriate curl requests, so I have a lot of empathy for Aaron here. Understand that Aaron's entire purpose was to Liberate Information that should have been free in the first place, so what he was doing was the exact opposite of abuse. To the best of my knowledge, and from what I can recall in the case, the real issue was the Physical Break and Enter - which should have resulted in all of 40 hours of community service and an apology to MIT.
- revelation 14y agoWe talked about this on previous threads (when he was still alive). Distributing static content is a very much solved problem. Even then, if you don't want someone to download 4 million articles, don't enable them to do so. Every time I ask JSTOR for an article, their servers vet the request and then fulfill it (or not).