4 ms·

I don't find the two analogous. Aaron would not have been charged with wire fraud if he had asked JSTOR, even if the original content owners tried to sue him. H

I don't find the two analogous. Aaron would not have been charged with wire fraud if he had asked JSTOR, even if the original content owners tried to sue him. However, he did not secure any kind of consent and it becomes a different situation. Not saying what I think happened was right but I don't think it is the same.

temphn 14y ago
Well, the whole point of the Google Books lawsuit is that they didn't ask first: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/54247-publishers-settle-google-books-lawsuit.html http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyrigh... The Association of American Publishers and Google’s agreement last week to settle the publishers’ long-running litigation over Google’s library scanning program put an end to the lengthy and expensive suit, but without resolving any of the underlying copyright and fair use issues. The main component of the deal: copyright owners with books scanned by Google under its library program can choose to “opt out” of the program and have their books removed. Of course, that settlement condition is something Google has offered copyright owners with books in the program all along. In other words, Google scanned and posted to the web first, and authors could opt-out if they so chose. So they didn't get consent first. Their rationale was good - there was no machine readable contact information and many of the authors were dead or had moved - but in this respect the situations are reasonably analogous. Had Aaron scraped say 10-100k rather than 4M articles and done some innovative NLP/data mining on the text (like Google N-grams), then showed that to JSTOR, despite the lack of up-front consent he might well have been able to get more or convince them to open up, especially if this 10-100k experiment showed monetization potential and could allow JSTOR to move to an open access model. Sadly, we'll never know.
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  They asked the libraries. The analogy would be complete if Google had gone into the libraries uninvited and started scanning.
InclinedPlane 14y ago
Think about the fact that before they started Apple Jobs and Woz were heavily involved in phone phreaking. What would they be doing instead if they had begun their careers today? Would they have dared to do the sort of things that Aaron did? And if the criminal justice system came down on them back then as hard as it did on Aaron today would Apple computer, or NeXt, or Pixar, etc. even exist today? Aaron was not a bad guy, nor did he seem to ever act with malicious intent. He broke some rules, certainly, but should the punishment for rule breaking be the destruction of someone's life or should it be just enough of a push to make them avoid rule breaking while keeping them a productive member of society?
- jamesaguilar 14y ago
  Thanks for the reply, but I already made it clear that I don't agree with how the case was handled. My only objection us that the analogy has a pretty big hole.

temphn 14y ago

Well, the whole point of the Google Books lawsuit is that they didn't ask first: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/54247-publishers-settle-google-books-lawsuit.html http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyrigh... The Association of American Publishers and Google’s agreement last week to settle the publishers’ long-running litigation over Google’s library scanning program put an end to the lengthy and expensive suit, but without resolving any of the underlying copyright and fair use issues. The main component of the deal: copyright owners with books scanned by Google under its library program can choose to “opt out” of the program and have their books removed. Of course, that settlement condition is something Google has offered copyright owners with books in the program all along. In other words, Google scanned and posted to the web first, and authors could opt-out if they so chose. So they didn't get consent first. Their rationale was good - there was no machine readable contact information and many of the authors were dead or had moved - but in this respect the situations are reasonably analogous. Had Aaron scraped say 10-100k rather than 4M articles and done some innovative NLP/data mining on the text (like Google N-grams), then showed that to JSTOR, despite the lack of up-front consent he might well have been able to get more or convince them to open up, especially if this 10-100k experiment showed monetization potential and could allow JSTOR to move to an open access model. Sadly, we'll never know.

jamesaguilar 14y ago
They asked the libraries. The analogy would be complete if Google had gone into the libraries uninvited and started scanning.

InclinedPlane 14y ago

Think about the fact that before they started Apple Jobs and Woz were heavily involved in phone phreaking. What would they be doing instead if they had begun their careers today? Would they have dared to do the sort of things that Aaron did? And if the criminal justice system came down on them back then as hard as it did on Aaron today would Apple computer, or NeXt, or Pixar, etc. even exist today? Aaron was not a bad guy, nor did he seem to ever act with malicious intent. He broke some rules, certainly, but should the punishment for rule breaking be the destruction of someone's life or should it be just enough of a push to make them avoid rule breaking while keeping them a productive member of society?

jamesaguilar 14y ago
Thanks for the reply, but I already made it clear that I don't agree with how the case was handled. My only objection us that the analogy has a pretty big hole.