2 ms·

"Continuing to access MIT's network after MIT tried to get him to stop." I am not really seeing the moral argument there. MIT's network is designed to be open

"Continuing to access MIT's network after MIT tried to get him to stop." I am not really seeing the moral argument there. MIT's network is designed to be open; a ban on a MAC address is, on such a network, little more than a polite request to not continue your access. Being rude by ignoring polite requests is not morally wrong. As for the law, all I can say is that there are an awful lot of criminals in this world if accessing a network that tries to block your computer is a crime. If the law criminalizes a common behavior, then the law itself is what is wrong. "behaving like a reasonable person" How conservative of you. I hear there are some lovely caves that people used to live in, until some unreasonable person had a "better" idea (I wonder if you would have made an argument for punishing him -- after all, not living in caves might disrupt the social order). "If I let you come apple picking in my orchard, you can't bring in a fruit truck and some day laborers and strip the trees bare." You are comparing apples to universal Turing machines. Your comparison is actually that bad -- you might as well be talking about the superbowl than Aaron Swartz. Aaron did not strip anyone or anything. He prevented nobody else from using JSTOR, nor did he stop anyone from reading the articles he downloaded, nor from using the network, nor from using the closet where he hid his laptop. He caused no measurable damage to anyone or anyone's property at any point in the JSTOR incident. "If JSTOR gives you permission to access journal articles for academic purposes..." ...then I should be free to use those articles for any purpose, because JSTOR has no claim to them or to the knowledge they contain. What gives JSTOR the moral right to tell anyone what they are allowed to do with the articles JSTOR provides to them? Sure, we have this thing called copyright that emerged from British attempts to censor books in the age of printing presses (I wonder if the Chinese firewall will lead to the creation of a similar law), but copyrights are in no way related to modern senses of morality or justice -- copyrights are just a way for the government to promote a particular class of business, and that is all they have ever been about in the United States. "Right" and "wrong" are no more relevant to copyright than they are to parking in a loading zone. "nobody needs it spelled out to them that this is the case." That is because prior to the attack on Aaron Swartz, nobody thought that automatically downloading scientific articles on a university network would ever warrant the attention of federal prosecutors. Now we know: don't you dare download articles using any software other than your web browser, and don't you dare do so if you ever suggested that those articles should be shared freely on the Internet, or else you'll face a long and expensive prosecution by the US government.

rayiner 14y ago
> I am not really seeing the moral argument there. MIT's network is designed to be open; a ban on a MAC address is, on such a network, little more than a polite request to not continue your access. MIT's network is a private network and they have complete authority over who gets to access it, in a legal sense and a moral sense. It's their prerogative to extend access to anyone except specifically chosen people. In our society, we do not treat "get off our lawn" and the equivalent as a "polite request." We treat it as an enforceable demand. > How conservative of you. Yes. We live in a society of rules and borders and boundaries. We like those things, so much that we often enforce them with guns (and cheer on those who do). It is not your prerogative to flout them as you please, but your burden to convince us which of those boundaries are unnecessary so we legislate accordingly. > What gives JSTOR the moral right to tell anyone what they are allowed to do with the articles JSTOR provides to them? JSTOR at the very least has a moral right to control how he used their private service to download the articles. > copyrights are in no way related to modern senses of morality or justice I disagree. I think most people believe that creators are entitled to control the distribution of their work. I think the prevailing mindset is that a digital creation should not be treated differently, for ownership purposes, than a physical creation. Do people download anyway? Sure. But people also sneak into movie theaters. That doesn't mean they feel that theater owners don't have a moral right to exclude non-paying viewers. To the extent that I think the law is out of step with the modern sense of justice is proportionality. People think (and I'd argue rightfully so), that downloading a movie should warrant the kind of slap on the wrist (if anything) that sneaking into the theater to watch that movie would warrant. Not huge dollar fines and possible jail time. Swartz's case really boils down to that: the trespassing charge was dropped, while the charge for accessing the network was not. He was trespassing, and he was accessing the network illegally, but if one was minor enough to be dropped the other should have been treated similarly.
- betterunix 14y ago
  "MIT's network is a private network and they have complete authority over who gets to access it, in a legal sense and a moral sense" Then as I said, there are an awful lot of criminals in our society, because people routinely access private networks without permission or in violation of requests to discontinue their access. "In our society, we do not treat "get off our lawn" and the equivalent as a "polite request." We treat it as an enforceable demand." Maybe so, but it is also technically trespassing to cross railroad tracks outside of designated grade-level crossings. In my town, there was a brief period where the police attempted to enforce that, and it was found to be absurd and counter-productive to do so: people from every level of society walk across the tracks without hesitation, without thinking about the misdemeanor offense they are committing, and often in plain view of the police. In almost all cases, they are causing no damage to anyone, and so the police do not care -- it benefits nobody to mindlessly arrest everyone who technically violates some law. "JSTOR at the very least has a moral right to control how he used their private service to download the articles." Sure, because they own their computers; they are free to restrict access, disconnect from the Internet, or encrypt everything without releasing the keys, and that is fine. They chose not to do so, so why should we care if they do not like the particular program Aaron used, or his particular plans for the documents he downloaded? "I think most people believe that creators are entitled to control the distribution of their work." I doubt that; outside of one person who works for the music industry yet to meet anyone who shows even one millisecond of hesitation when it comes to sharing copies of photos, music, movies, written documents, or any other creative work. Most people are perfectly willing to sing "Happy Birthday to You" in public, without spending any mental effort on the idea that it is copyrighted or that the copyright holder forbids public performances. The only moral issues people have with copyright infringement are when (a) artists are "ripped off" by it (but that is usually something the copyright holders are doing, and is irrelevant to Aaron's case anyway) or (b) when someone claims credit for work they did not do (equally irrelevant here). Copyright as a system has nothing to do with either of these: artists and creative people are routinely "ripped off" without any copyright violation occurring, and copyright does not require attribution (and creative people are often not credited for their work under the copyright system). It has nothing to do with morals, it is a legal framework for promoting businesses that were important to society in the 18th century. It is as morally relevant to most people as a bill meant to promote the laying of fiber optic lines to built Internet infrastructure. "People think (and I'd argue rightfully so), that downloading a movie should warrant the kind of slap on the wrist" No they don't; most people think downloading a movie is fine because they want to watch it, and that it is just the fat cats in Hollywood who would care about stopping them. Hollywood has desperately pushed for a moral basis for copyright, but has largely failed: it's too complex and most people cannot be bothered.

rayiner 14y ago

> I am not really seeing the moral argument there. MIT's network is designed to be open; a ban on a MAC address is, on such a network, little more than a polite request to not continue your access. MIT's network is a private network and they have complete authority over who gets to access it, in a legal sense and a moral sense. It's their prerogative to extend access to anyone except specifically chosen people. In our society, we do not treat "get off our lawn" and the equivalent as a "polite request." We treat it as an enforceable demand. > How conservative of you. Yes. We live in a society of rules and borders and boundaries. We like those things, so much that we often enforce them with guns (and cheer on those who do). It is not your prerogative to flout them as you please, but your burden to convince us which of those boundaries are unnecessary so we legislate accordingly. > What gives JSTOR the moral right to tell anyone what they are allowed to do with the articles JSTOR provides to them? JSTOR at the very least has a moral right to control how he used their private service to download the articles. > copyrights are in no way related to modern senses of morality or justice I disagree. I think most people believe that creators are entitled to control the distribution of their work. I think the prevailing mindset is that a digital creation should not be treated differently, for ownership purposes, than a physical creation. Do people download anyway? Sure. But people also sneak into movie theaters. That doesn't mean they feel that theater owners don't have a moral right to exclude non-paying viewers. To the extent that I think the law is out of step with the modern sense of justice is proportionality. People think (and I'd argue rightfully so), that downloading a movie should warrant the kind of slap on the wrist (if anything) that sneaking into the theater to watch that movie would warrant. Not huge dollar fines and possible jail time. Swartz's case really boils down to that: the trespassing charge was dropped, while the charge for accessing the network was not. He was trespassing, and he was accessing the network illegally, but if one was minor enough to be dropped the other should have been treated similarly.

betterunix 14y ago
"MIT's network is a private network and they have complete authority over who gets to access it, in a legal sense and a moral sense" Then as I said, there are an awful lot of criminals in our society, because people routinely access private networks without permission or in violation of requests to discontinue their access. "In our society, we do not treat "get off our lawn" and the equivalent as a "polite request." We treat it as an enforceable demand." Maybe so, but it is also technically trespassing to cross railroad tracks outside of designated grade-level crossings. In my town, there was a brief period where the police attempted to enforce that, and it was found to be absurd and counter-productive to do so: people from every level of society walk across the tracks without hesitation, without thinking about the misdemeanor offense they are committing, and often in plain view of the police. In almost all cases, they are causing no damage to anyone, and so the police do not care -- it benefits nobody to mindlessly arrest everyone who technically violates some law. "JSTOR at the very least has a moral right to control how he used their private service to download the articles." Sure, because they own their computers; they are free to restrict access, disconnect from the Internet, or encrypt everything without releasing the keys, and that is fine. They chose not to do so, so why should we care if they do not like the particular program Aaron used, or his particular plans for the documents he downloaded? "I think most people believe that creators are entitled to control the distribution of their work." I doubt that; outside of one person who works for the music industry yet to meet anyone who shows even one millisecond of hesitation when it comes to sharing copies of photos, music, movies, written documents, or any other creative work. Most people are perfectly willing to sing "Happy Birthday to You" in public, without spending any mental effort on the idea that it is copyrighted or that the copyright holder forbids public performances. The only moral issues people have with copyright infringement are when (a) artists are "ripped off" by it (but that is usually something the copyright holders are doing, and is irrelevant to Aaron's case anyway) or (b) when someone claims credit for work they did not do (equally irrelevant here). Copyright as a system has nothing to do with either of these: artists and creative people are routinely "ripped off" without any copyright violation occurring, and copyright does not require attribution (and creative people are often not credited for their work under the copyright system). It has nothing to do with morals, it is a legal framework for promoting businesses that were important to society in the 18th century. It is as morally relevant to most people as a bill meant to promote the laying of fiber optic lines to built Internet infrastructure. "People think (and I'd argue rightfully so), that downloading a movie should warrant the kind of slap on the wrist" No they don't; most people think downloading a movie is fine because they want to watch it, and that it is just the fat cats in Hollywood who would care about stopping them. Hollywood has desperately pushed for a moral basis for copyright, but has largely failed: it's too complex and most people cannot be bothered.