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> and did so reasonably. They still believe that? Sorry but they're unfit for the job. They need to go. There was nothing reasonable about their actions on thi

> and did so reasonably. They still believe that? Sorry but they're unfit for the job. They need to go. There was nothing reasonable about their actions on this case. > a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. Six months in jail for downloading files that were accessible to him? All he did was violate terms of service! Are we going to start arresting under-age Facebook users or gamers that cheat next? Should they get six months too? This statement is just icing on the cake that proves that Ortiz is inappropriate for that job/role.

corporalagumbo 14y ago
http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.html http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.... Downloading four million files, apparently. And if by breaking terms and services you mean illegally distributing protected content and threatening the business model of JSTOR then yes, I suppose that is true.
- jacquesm 14y ago
  > illegally distributing protected content Aaron never did that. He may have been planning that but nobody can say this for a fact.
  - Vivtek 14y ago
    Like Philip Greenspun says, for all we know he wanted to do metaanalysis. There's no evidence at all he planned to distribute the files.
  - RandomComment 14y ago
    Really? Not sure if it is just me but i found the JSTOR.torrent years ago and I always assumed it was from Aaron, the file was big like 35gb, I know there is another branded Aaron torrent floating around somehwere Ah worked it out, someguy did it a while ago, http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosoph... and released his version as a tribute to Aaron. Mystery solved.
- ghshephard 14y ago
  JSTOR wanted nothing to do with this case [Edit: they are a not-for-profit. Note that it's "http://www.jstor.org/ http://www.jstor.org/ not jstor.com.] JSTOR indicated that they had settled everything the needed to settle privately with Aaron. This was all on MIT and the Prosecution.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    I'm not a lawyer. I don't know what the precedent is or what is reasonable when an affected party does not wish for charges to be pressed.
- UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
  One, two, a million, four million, what difference does it actually make? The crime was violating the terms, it isn't relevant where the EOF bit was transmitted. If you made the same files half as big he would have "stolen" twice as many files, or twice as big then he would have done half the crime by your logic. He never distributed anything. No clue where you got that from? Additionally "threatening a business model" within its self isn't a crime. In fact one might argue that it is a very good thing. Monopolies have often fallen to disruptive technologies, should we go arrest the people behind VoIP because they went after the telecos? Or the inventors of the printing press because they put scribes out of business? Or the inventor of the light-bulb because nobody had to light all of those candles each night? The only "crime" here was violating terms. For that they want to hit him with between six months and thirty five years of jail (plus costs, fines, and a criminal record). If this same over-reaction was applied to all terms violators we would have half the country in jail right now.
  - corporalagumbo 14y ago
    It makes a big difference. Four million is apparently the majority of JSTOR's database. Keep in mind that JSTOR doesn't own those articles, it just arranges approved access to paying institutions on behalf of the various journals which do own the articles. If Aaron had distributed them he might have damaged around a thousand different institutions involved in an important segment of the knowledge and innovation industry. You can argue that that industry should change but I am not sure I can agree that a brute force assault is a good way to create constructive change, especially in a relatively fragile and cash-strapped field like academia. Anyway, I've used JSTOR a lot as a university student. It's a really good service. They don't create the economics of the journal industry, they just try to work within it. And no, I disagree with you, Aaron's actions strike me as extreme and out of the ordinary.
    - colin_jack 14y ago
      "If Aaron had distributed them he might have damaged around a thousand different institutions involved in an important segment of the knowledge and innovation industry" I know there is his manifesto from a couple of years ago but we can't be sure what he was going to do with them.
- Peaker 14y ago
  Did he actually distribute anything?
- jmilloy 14y ago
  Now I'm on the lookout! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5066721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5066721
- jlgreco 14y ago
  > threatening the business model of JSTOR I keep on hearing this, and it continues to make no sense to me, so forgive me for reposting one of previous posts (s/commercial value/business model/ if it helps): It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date. Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely. Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408). So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.
tzs 14y ago
These two links will clear up a lot of misconceptions you seem to have about this case. http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
- tcuk 14y ago
  EDIT: found the second article, comment redundant.
  - girvo 14y ago
    They both ended up on the front page, the latter today. And most people agreed that they were excellent analyses.
    - mpyne 14y ago
      They should both be required reading for those interested in the aaronsw case IMHO. There's a reason the consensus about the case (even on HN!) before Aaron's suicide was so wildly different from the current witchhunt, and the reason is contained in those two Kerr writeups.
- toyg 14y ago
  Kerr does a textbook analysis of the facts, ignoring the particularities of this case. Not one but three (!) lawyers picked up Aaron's case, and all three failed to reach a plea bargain -- clearly the prosecution was more "motivated" than usual. Given this fact, the fact that in these circumstances a bargain is not actually binding for the judge, and the other fact that there was no interest in keeping Swartz happy post-sentence (no co-conspirators to turn, no further loot to recover etc), you can see why Swartz would not agree to just put himself in the hands of a Justice, and why the "six months" scenario was actually fairly unrealistic (and still disproportionate, regardless). I also disagree with his view that (I paraphrase) "we shouldn't criticize special cases, we should criticize what goes on every day". Yes, we all agree that you shouldn't "be good" only at Christmas, but the reality of this world is that legislative bodies quite often (if not all the time) will only act on the impulse of particular cases. This is what is happening now, which is good. Also, I'm sure that not "every day" prosecutors callously dismiss proven suicidal tendencies in pursuit of career-enhancing convictions, if anything to avoid ending up in a mess like this -- except for Heymann, who clearly won't give two shits about the wellbeing of young hackers. One case is a mistake, two is a pattern, and Heymann and his boss should take responsibility for their behaviour.

corporalagumbo 14y ago

http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.html http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.... Downloading four million files, apparently. And if by breaking terms and services you mean illegally distributing protected content and threatening the business model of JSTOR then yes, I suppose that is true.

jacquesm 14y ago
> illegally distributing protected content Aaron never did that. He may have been planning that but nobody can say this for a fact.
- Vivtek 14y ago
  Like Philip Greenspun says, for all we know he wanted to do metaanalysis. There's no evidence at all he planned to distribute the files.
- RandomComment 14y ago
  Really? Not sure if it is just me but i found the JSTOR.torrent years ago and I always assumed it was from Aaron, the file was big like 35gb, I know there is another branded Aaron torrent floating around somehwere Ah worked it out, someguy did it a while ago, http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society__fro http://thepiratebay.se/torrent/6554331/Papers_from_Philosoph... and released his version as a tribute to Aaron. Mystery solved.
ghshephard 14y ago
JSTOR wanted nothing to do with this case [Edit: they are a not-for-profit. Note that it's "http://www.jstor.org/ http://www.jstor.org/ not jstor.com.] JSTOR indicated that they had settled everything the needed to settle privately with Aaron. This was all on MIT and the Prosecution.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  I'm not a lawyer. I don't know what the precedent is or what is reasonable when an affected party does not wish for charges to be pressed.
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
One, two, a million, four million, what difference does it actually make? The crime was violating the terms, it isn't relevant where the EOF bit was transmitted. If you made the same files half as big he would have "stolen" twice as many files, or twice as big then he would have done half the crime by your logic. He never distributed anything. No clue where you got that from? Additionally "threatening a business model" within its self isn't a crime. In fact one might argue that it is a very good thing. Monopolies have often fallen to disruptive technologies, should we go arrest the people behind VoIP because they went after the telecos? Or the inventors of the printing press because they put scribes out of business? Or the inventor of the light-bulb because nobody had to light all of those candles each night? The only "crime" here was violating terms. For that they want to hit him with between six months and thirty five years of jail (plus costs, fines, and a criminal record). If this same over-reaction was applied to all terms violators we would have half the country in jail right now.
- corporalagumbo 14y ago
  It makes a big difference. Four million is apparently the majority of JSTOR's database. Keep in mind that JSTOR doesn't own those articles, it just arranges approved access to paying institutions on behalf of the various journals which do own the articles. If Aaron had distributed them he might have damaged around a thousand different institutions involved in an important segment of the knowledge and innovation industry. You can argue that that industry should change but I am not sure I can agree that a brute force assault is a good way to create constructive change, especially in a relatively fragile and cash-strapped field like academia. Anyway, I've used JSTOR a lot as a university student. It's a really good service. They don't create the economics of the journal industry, they just try to work within it. And no, I disagree with you, Aaron's actions strike me as extreme and out of the ordinary.
  - colin_jack 14y ago
    "If Aaron had distributed them he might have damaged around a thousand different institutions involved in an important segment of the knowledge and innovation industry" I know there is his manifesto from a couple of years ago but we can't be sure what he was going to do with them.
Peaker 14y ago
Did he actually distribute anything?
jmilloy 14y ago
Now I'm on the lookout! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5066721 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5066721
jlgreco 14y ago
> threatening the business model of JSTOR I keep on hearing this, and it continues to make no sense to me, so forgive me for reposting one of previous posts (s/commercial value/business model/ if it helps): It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date. Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely. Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408). So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.

tzs 14y ago

These two links will clear up a lot of misconceptions you seem to have about this case. http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-aaron-swartz-part-2-prosecutorial-discretion/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...

tcuk 14y ago
EDIT: found the second article, comment redundant.
- girvo 14y ago
  They both ended up on the front page, the latter today. And most people agreed that they were excellent analyses.
  - mpyne 14y ago
    They should both be required reading for those interested in the aaronsw case IMHO. There's a reason the consensus about the case (even on HN!) before Aaron's suicide was so wildly different from the current witchhunt, and the reason is contained in those two Kerr writeups.
toyg 14y ago
Kerr does a textbook analysis of the facts, ignoring the particularities of this case. Not one but three (!) lawyers picked up Aaron's case, and all three failed to reach a plea bargain -- clearly the prosecution was more "motivated" than usual. Given this fact, the fact that in these circumstances a bargain is not actually binding for the judge, and the other fact that there was no interest in keeping Swartz happy post-sentence (no co-conspirators to turn, no further loot to recover etc), you can see why Swartz would not agree to just put himself in the hands of a Justice, and why the "six months" scenario was actually fairly unrealistic (and still disproportionate, regardless). I also disagree with his view that (I paraphrase) "we shouldn't criticize special cases, we should criticize what goes on every day". Yes, we all agree that you shouldn't "be good" only at Christmas, but the reality of this world is that legislative bodies quite often (if not all the time) will only act on the impulse of particular cases. This is what is happening now, which is good. Also, I'm sure that not "every day" prosecutors callously dismiss proven suicidal tendencies in pursuit of career-enhancing convictions, if anything to avoid ending up in a mess like this -- except for Heymann, who clearly won't give two shits about the wellbeing of young hackers. One case is a mistake, two is a pattern, and Heymann and his boss should take responsibility for their behaviour.