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"If he didn't think he was committing a crime why did he attempt to conceal his identity?" I did not say that he thought he was doing something entirely legal,
by betterunix 14y ago
"If he didn't think he was committing a crime why did he attempt to conceal his identity?"
I did not say that he thought he was doing something entirely legal, I said that he probably only expected a civil case for his actions, which is entirely reasonable. If I had to guess, I would say that whatever attempt he made to conceal his identity was done to ensure that he would not face a court order to stop until he had finished what he had set out to do.
If you are saying that concealing one's identity is evidence that a person is doing something criminal, then you are accusing a good friend of mine of being a criminal. He used proxy servers to download large numbers of patents, as part of his masters thesis project, to avoid bandwidth restrictions imposed by servers. In the end, he developed a system that helps locate patents, and could help people avoid violating patents or find prior art. Should he face a 50 year sentence too?
"If he had been accessing student's personal info, would you still be defending him?"
He did nothing even remotely similar to that. His actions were as close to accessing private information as posting to HN.
"Unauthorized access is unauthorized access."
His accessing was not unauthorized. MIT's network is open to the public, and JSTOR's archive is open to anyone on MIT's network. What access was unauthorized in this case?
- TylerE 14y agoFrom the JSTOR TOS: (b) except as set forth in Section 2.1(e) and 5 of the Terms and Conditions for Use for Journals, Plants, GIS Data, Select Other Content Types, and Data for Research below, provide and/or authorize access to the Content available through Individual Access, the Publisher Sales Service, or other programs to persons or entities other than Authorized Users; (d) undertake any activity such as computer programs that automatically download or export Content, commonly known as web robots, spiders, crawlers, wanderers or accelerators that may interfere with, disrupt or otherwise burden the JSTOR server(s) or any third-party server(s) being used or accessed in connection with JSTOR; or (e) make any use, display, performance, reproduction, or distribution that exceeds or violates these Terms and Conditions of Service and the Content-Specific Terms and Conditions of Use.
- betterunix 14y agoOh, that's interesting, but so what? You must have missed this, which happened before Aaron did anything related to JSTOR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lori_Drew#Guilty_verdict_set_aside https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lori_Drew#Guilty_verdict_set_a...
- dmak 14y agoIs this TOS from the time when Aaron downloaded the articles? I wouldn't be surprised if they updated it after this incident which would invalidate your argument.
- darkarmani 14y agoIs that the same JSTOR that refused to press charges? You can't really base your argument on his felony charges from the entity that didn't press charges.