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I don't understand. I've downloaded articles from JSTOR, Project Muse, books on top of books, and am publicly re-hosting them through my own Dropbox, which I pu

I don't understand. I've downloaded articles from JSTOR, Project Muse, books on top of books, and am publicly re-hosting them through my own Dropbox, which I publicly link to on my own Website. Maybe I'm missing something here. Was he made an example? Is this the fundamental nature of the protest and the outrage, that we perceive that he was made an example of, that we are aware, and that it is unfair, in some essential way, for them to target leaders who are no less perpetrators than the rest of us? Because we do that to them when BoingBoing or Anons cry to bring down or apply heat to CNN or pundits. I'm not playing devil's advocate, but I'm trying to understand the nature of the protest. I believe these questions can be fairly asked about [the protest] without counting as some sort of insincerity toward Mr. Schwartz.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago
If I had to name the cause of the outrage, it is that the charges were so disproportional to the alleged offense that it drove a good man to suicide. If he had been charged with an offense for which the penalty was proportionate to what he is alleged to have done, e.g. a misdemeanor with a $500 fine or a fortnight in jail, I have to imagine that there would be very little protesting going on, and for that matter that he would still be alive. But they decided they had to break him, and they did, so here we are.
- nerdfiles 14y ago
  I'm just going to state this, as statefully as I can, without trying to be sensationalist. Everyone I come across these days insist on calling me "schizophrenic" or "paranoid" or what have you: But "Marshall Law", as I understand it, is _more or less_ in effect, and a lot of people are talking about Obama's UAVs and whatever it is they do. (I know it was repealed. But you get what I mean. We're all consuming roughly the same information; so can we just bootstrap past the facts, please? I don't want to play semantics, pedantics, or any kind of fact-checking game.) So I must ask: Is this a civil war? When do we call it that? 100 years ago, it meant having a militia or something of that order. Now we all play slapstick at our keyboards and write "modules" and pentests. Is it possible to call a spade a spade? I'm asking seriously here. Every week I have to stop and ask myself, "Should I read the news? Will there be another episode or thread of death that I'll have to keep track of on account of something our government did?" I really do appreciate Mr. Schwartz efforts and work. But this country is taking heavy demoralizing blows every week. Beating someone down who isn't trained or prepared to fight is a different matter from beating down leaders, ideologues, activitists, and fighters. It seems like this country, our communities, are being served heavy blows, in much the same way the U.S. demoralizes the "Middle East" with its extended arm of Social/Big Media.
  - AnthonyMouse 14y ago
    I don't know if you can call it a civil war when only one side has a military. There are no defined "sides" even. Not everyone in government or politics is a bad guy -- look at Sen. Wyden or Rep. Lofgren, for example. It's almost like the internal struggle we all face in our own lives. Doing the right thing is hard, doing the wrong thing is convenient. So the people we have running our government are human, they pick the wrong thing sometimes. Most of the time they probably don't even realize they're acting like the bad guys. People can rationalize anything. What we have to do is to stop them when they do wrong. The check on the common criminal is law enforcement. The check on law enforcement is Congress. The check on Congress is the people. We the people need to do our job.
    - nerdfiles 14y ago
      Something needs to be done, I agree, but I do not understand what you mean when you say "we the people". (I'm not sure how one reads the Internet Declaration of Independence and walks away thinking that phrase is meaningful in any politically relevant sense.) And honestly. I'm sure a majority of us here are prepared to print a gun and build a quadcopter at the drop of a pizza slice. [Ugh. Of course that doesn't mean "let's go out and get crazy!" I just want to make it clear that something is emerging socially in this country, and it is due to the fact that weaponry is so widely available. (And even further, by the Bureau for Justice Assistance, my Terminal is technically considered a weapon.) Many of us defend the idea of printing a gun, and this in itself is problematic for something like a "Congress" that cannot even begin to understand, in any practical sense, what 3D printing amounts to economically and socially.]
noonespecial 14y ago
I've been trying to get a handle on my own feelings of outrage all day. Lots of people are given what amounts to life in prison for a few ounces of weed thanks to ridiculous "three strikes" laws, and while I'm outraged, its orders of magnitude less than what I feel in this case. It could just be that Aaron was a "kindred spirit" but what I think at last is that it comes down to the fact that someone who was so valuable to us was taken from us by the actions of someone who offered us so very little with their own life, for nothing more than a small amount of personal gain for themseleves. Its the same feeling I get when I learn an NFL star or a merit scholar was killed in a mugging over a few hundred bucks by some worthless thug. And so I'm outraged.
jacquesm 14y ago
He was made an example of because he didn't think small. Aaron actually had the chops to pull these things off and make them stick. Witness the PACER affair for example, if this wasn't a direct retaliation you have to wonder if there wasn't a link between that and this. In the aggregate your dropbox and everybody else's probably contain at least as many articles as Aaron downloaded, but JSTOR isn't scared of that because it isn't centralized for easy access. That's when their little gravy train becomes endangered. Don't be misled by them being a 'non profit', there is plenty of money made around non-profits.
berlinbrown 14y ago
He downloaded 4 million articles and physically hard-wired his machine on the network.

AnthonyMouse 14y ago

If I had to name the cause of the outrage, it is that the charges were so disproportional to the alleged offense that it drove a good man to suicide. If he had been charged with an offense for which the penalty was proportionate to what he is alleged to have done, e.g. a misdemeanor with a $500 fine or a fortnight in jail, I have to imagine that there would be very little protesting going on, and for that matter that he would still be alive. But they decided they had to break him, and they did, so here we are.

nerdfiles 14y ago
I'm just going to state this, as statefully as I can, without trying to be sensationalist. Everyone I come across these days insist on calling me "schizophrenic" or "paranoid" or what have you: But "Marshall Law", as I understand it, is _more or less_ in effect, and a lot of people are talking about Obama's UAVs and whatever it is they do. (I know it was repealed. But you get what I mean. We're all consuming roughly the same information; so can we just bootstrap past the facts, please? I don't want to play semantics, pedantics, or any kind of fact-checking game.) So I must ask: Is this a civil war? When do we call it that? 100 years ago, it meant having a militia or something of that order. Now we all play slapstick at our keyboards and write "modules" and pentests. Is it possible to call a spade a spade? I'm asking seriously here. Every week I have to stop and ask myself, "Should I read the news? Will there be another episode or thread of death that I'll have to keep track of on account of something our government did?" I really do appreciate Mr. Schwartz efforts and work. But this country is taking heavy demoralizing blows every week. Beating someone down who isn't trained or prepared to fight is a different matter from beating down leaders, ideologues, activitists, and fighters. It seems like this country, our communities, are being served heavy blows, in much the same way the U.S. demoralizes the "Middle East" with its extended arm of Social/Big Media.
- AnthonyMouse 14y ago
  I don't know if you can call it a civil war when only one side has a military. There are no defined "sides" even. Not everyone in government or politics is a bad guy -- look at Sen. Wyden or Rep. Lofgren, for example. It's almost like the internal struggle we all face in our own lives. Doing the right thing is hard, doing the wrong thing is convenient. So the people we have running our government are human, they pick the wrong thing sometimes. Most of the time they probably don't even realize they're acting like the bad guys. People can rationalize anything. What we have to do is to stop them when they do wrong. The check on the common criminal is law enforcement. The check on law enforcement is Congress. The check on Congress is the people. We the people need to do our job.
  - nerdfiles 14y ago
    Something needs to be done, I agree, but I do not understand what you mean when you say "we the people". (I'm not sure how one reads the Internet Declaration of Independence and walks away thinking that phrase is meaningful in any politically relevant sense.) And honestly. I'm sure a majority of us here are prepared to print a gun and build a quadcopter at the drop of a pizza slice. [Ugh. Of course that doesn't mean "let's go out and get crazy!" I just want to make it clear that something is emerging socially in this country, and it is due to the fact that weaponry is so widely available. (And even further, by the Bureau for Justice Assistance, my Terminal is technically considered a weapon.) Many of us defend the idea of printing a gun, and this in itself is problematic for something like a "Congress" that cannot even begin to understand, in any practical sense, what 3D printing amounts to economically and socially.]

noonespecial 14y ago

I've been trying to get a handle on my own feelings of outrage all day. Lots of people are given what amounts to life in prison for a few ounces of weed thanks to ridiculous "three strikes" laws, and while I'm outraged, its orders of magnitude less than what I feel in this case. It could just be that Aaron was a "kindred spirit" but what I think at last is that it comes down to the fact that someone who was so valuable to us was taken from us by the actions of someone who offered us so very little with their own life, for nothing more than a small amount of personal gain for themseleves. Its the same feeling I get when I learn an NFL star or a merit scholar was killed in a mugging over a few hundred bucks by some worthless thug. And so I'm outraged.

jacquesm 14y ago

He was made an example of because he didn't think small. Aaron actually had the chops to pull these things off and make them stick. Witness the PACER affair for example, if this wasn't a direct retaliation you have to wonder if there wasn't a link between that and this. In the aggregate your dropbox and everybody else's probably contain at least as many articles as Aaron downloaded, but JSTOR isn't scared of that because it isn't centralized for easy access. That's when their little gravy train becomes endangered. Don't be misled by them being a 'non profit', there is plenty of money made around non-profits.

berlinbrown 14y ago

He downloaded 4 million articles and physically hard-wired his machine on the network.