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Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

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Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#101

Post by gnaritas »

ddingus wrote: post #97
gnaritas wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can't say that it was wilful civil disobedience and then say that he went about it the wrong way, you contradict yourself as that's kind of the definition of civil disobedience. I didn't mean "morally" wrong, I mean wrong approach. That's not contradictory at all; civil disobedience is not always the correct way to go about change. Sometimes it is, like when its done en-masse; going it alone, wrong approach. >…

You are very seriously misinformed. For there to be a defensible claim of theft, the property owner must lose their property. Someone experiences something missing. Infringement exists as a concept and an element of law because it is not theft, specifically.

Already corrected that, not germane to the point; he wasn't charged with theft.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#102

Post by rubberstamp »

wolfgke wrote: post #23
jason_slack wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not angry. But I am disappointed to the point I think we need serious reform. This means a call to action. This is what Aaron did.

> I'm not angry. But I am disappointed to the point I think we need serious reform. This means a call to action. Aaron can't do this an anymore since he was driven into suicide by the criminal prosecution of his country, he can't do it anymore. So: Don't call for action - act instead!

I remember reading on arstechnica about Aaron.

US justice system has so much inconsistencies. Punishment for copyright cases being harsher than the ones for Actual crimes being one of them. Lets not forget that he is being called criminal because he broke a law, a silly thing signed into law probably because someone lobbyed so hard for it. He is no actual criminal. He didn't feel the articles he downloaded from servers should be kept private. At least the research papers funded with public money should be public property. But so much pressure was put on him that he took his own life. If justice system was fair, he could've faced it. But currently the system is broken. He knew that and felt hopeless. Pushing for things like banning him from all things electronic, and thus internet, is not the right way to serve justice. What reforms have taken place since then?

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#104

Post by [deleted] »

quanticle wrote: post #36
andrepd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Almost no one does. That's not even remotely true. Our justice system may be severely fucked in many ways, but it's not completely nonfunctional. But we hear about the problems whenever something goes wrong. The other 99.9 percent of the time when things go smoothly we don't even notice...

There is a huge difference between things going smoothly and things being just . Something like 95% of cases in the US don't even go to trial. They're ended in a plea bargain, which allows the prosecutor to serve as both judge and jury. I do not think that is a sign of a healthy justice system, nor a sign of a justice system that actually pursues justice .

[deleted]

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#105

Post by Chathamization »

dlandis wrote: post #63
gnaritas wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And why would that come to mind when none of it is true? Firstly, Aaron is responsible for his own death, it was suicide. Secondly, it's the zealous prosecutor you should be mad at, MIT is not to blame here; Aaron broke many laws and they were well within their rights to have him arrested. Good intentions aside, what Aaron did was illegal and he deserved to be arrested for it; what he didn't deserve was more than pro…

Well oftentimes colleges can and will exercise discretion when it comes to having a student arrested and they will perform their own internal inquiry to determine whether an offense warrants arrest and prosecution. That's just the way it goes. Colleges should do the right thing for their students and protect them when appropriate because all kids do stupid things. MIT would have known pretty well what type of prosecu…

That's a very good point. It's pretty common when a sexual assault happens for the school to handle it internally rather than notify the authorities. Apparently, this is the case at MIT, and 1 in 6 female students have reported being sexually assaulted[1].

When a school sends police after someone for downloading academic files, and yet decides to not send the police after sex offenders (dealing with them internally and not even expelling them), they have pretty screwed up priorities.

[1] http://tech.mit.edu/V134/N50/surveyresults.html

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#106

Post by ericd »

raldi wrote: post #68
quanticle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic…

> For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...] You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.

I've heard stories from my days at MIT of people doing much worse things in server closets. The MIT community's view on these things is vastly different from the federal government's, and there's a large and shocking disconnect when those laws are applied to what's normally fairly accepted (if not explicitly, then implicitly condoned) behavior in the community.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#107

Post by andrei_says_ »

wolfgke wrote: post #50
an_account wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, it is the sign of a very healthy justice system. When cases are cut and dry there's no reason to go to trial. A basic example: I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case?

> I know I jaywalked, and I got caught, so I pay the already predetermined fine. Why wasted tons of resources taking everything to trial and redifing the system with every case? Why punish jaywalking?

Because in a society believing in punitive justice, punishment is morally right.

There's also restorative justice of course but it's more complex and does not bring the same simplistic carnal satisfaction.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#108

Post by qaq »

gnaritas wrote: post #84
wolfgke wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Brave words, but they're just words; people react differently when actually faced with such circumstances. And that is why as a prosecutor you should better be careful than sorry (though I don't know whether Carmen Ortiz is the latter).

That's not a prosecutor's job to worry about the mental state of a defendant. It's their job to prosecute the case if the evidence is there, and it was. The defense can worry about the defendants state of mind, that's part of their job. This prosecutor was overzealous in the charges being made, but there's no doubt they had a strong case against him and he was guilty of a felony.

I think it's just in sharp contrast of how say top officers of major banks that laundered 378.4bn USD in drug money were treated (Wachovia, Wells Fargo ...).

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#109

Post by id »

raldi wrote: post #68
quanticle wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. He absolutely did break the law. I, personally don't dispute that, nor do I think that that's a controversial fact here. The trouble that I and many other commenters here have with what happened to Aaron Swartz is the gross disproportionality of the punishment he was facing. For downloading academic…

> For downloading academic papers, he was facing [...] You left out the part where he snuck into a server closet and tampered with the network equipment. Among other things, that's burglary.

> that's burglary

No, it's not.

Re: Aaron Swartz died three years ago today

#110

Post by andrei_says_ »

an_account wrote: post #51
wolfgke wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just to play devil's advocate here (and I understand this goes against prevailing opinion), but he did break the law. Aaron himself said "There is no justice in following unjust laws." > https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj... I even go further and say that you can't be good and lawful at the same time - at least not in any currently existing system of laws.

Is the right course of action to break "unjust" laws, or to just fight to change them? This is an opinion, but I argue that every person has a different definition of what is "just", and if everyone followed their definition of "just", than our legal system would break down. Society functions on a set of laws, but those laws can change for the better.

Unfortunately studies show that lawmaking in the U.S. does not reflect public opinion and interests except for the top % of richest people.

In the face of this reality, direct action exposing publicly funded papers to the public kind of makes sense.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746

"A proposed policy change with low support among economically elite Americans (one-out-of-five in favour) is adopted only about 18% of the time," they write, "while a proposed change with high support (four-out-of-five in favour) is adopted about 45% of the time." On the other hand: When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organised interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it. They conclude: Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.

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