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Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

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Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#31

Post by SeanDav »

tptacek wrote: post #8
SeanDav wrote: post #5

EDIT:Make my point more clear Edited comment: It seems to me that Federal law is able to be applied to websites created by private individuals or businesses. As long as the ToS has knowingly been broken and the person doing the breaking has benefited materially then he is at risk of federal prosecution. I don't see a lot of comment about reasonable the ToS has to be. This just strikes as being completely irrational.…

No, you cannot do that. A prosecutor must demonstrate, first to a grand jury, then to a criminal jury, and simultaneously to a judge, that the accused not only violated the terms of service to a website, but in doing so caused material harm or found material gain, and that they did so knowing that they were violating the terms of the site.

The fact seems to remain that any private individual can create a website and have the force of federal government apply to a third party as long as said party has knowingly broken the ToS and gained materially somehow from that.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#32

Post by sp332 »

raldi wrote: post #26
Domenic_S wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Step 1: Write a ToS for your private entity Step 2: Catch someone violating it Step 3: Sic the Feds (government) on them for violating it (your private, unvetted agreement). (no comment from me personally, but I think that's what the GP was saying.)

I'm pretty sure sneaking into a server closet and patching your computer into their network was already against the law before this incident happened.

It was a janitorial closet, not a server room. And connecting to a network is not illegal.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#33

Post by ek »

danielweber wrote: post #24
mukaiji wrote: post #17

RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submissio…

organizations that have not contributed financially to the research charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want. If the researchers d…

Unfortunately, this is something that has to occur as a systematic change. Individual researchers are not to blame, necessarily. When you are told by your university that you must publish or face not getting tenure, what they mean is that you must publish in a peer-reviewed journal (or conference, since most of what we talk about here is CS and CS is still a conference field mostly). We could realign the review process so that it was something taken on by universities, for example, but this will require a major systematic change.

Peer review is important. It will not stop being important, but unfortunately the service of peer review is currently only being offered by mostly for-profit organizations, which is the primary problem.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#34

Post by ef4 »

salimmadjd wrote: post #2

This could be very troubling for scrapers, as they frequently breach the terms of service. If successfully prosecuted it would encourage and empower sites with content that get scraped to push for criminal charges and win given this precedence.

Keep in mind that his alleged actions go way behind scraping. He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content.

I sympathize with his goals, but I have to wonder what he was thinking. If the goal was liberating the information and I was in his shoes, I would have found a much more paranoid way to go about it. MIT is a very open environment, and I'm sure he could have recruited sympathizers with legitimate access.

Which makes me wonder if he really cared about getting caught. Civil disobedience can be an effective tactic, but in this case it's simply too easy to paint him as an "evil hacker".

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#35

Post by cube13 »

drcube wrote: post #29
danielweber wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

organizations that have not contributed financially to the research charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want. If the researchers d…

> As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. How is that a valuable service? Millions of people do that for free on the web every day. Hell, I'm doing it right now.

For cutting edge theoretical research, there are only a handful of people in the world with the knowledge to review the research. And having millions of people that really don't have a clue about it doesn't produce anything worthwhile.

So it is a valuable service to provide.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#36

Post by solarexplorer »

danielweber wrote: post #24
mukaiji wrote: post #17

RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submissio…

organizations that have not contributed financially to the research charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published. You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want. If the researchers d…

It's the researchers themselfes who edit and peer-review the content. And academics are kind of locked into those journals. Just starting your own free publication is not easy because as an academic you are forced to publish in the established journals who demand exclusive content. Only those journals have a high impact factors which are the basis of the arithmetic formula used to measure their academic success. The whole system is rigged...

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#39

Post by bensw »

ef4 wrote: post #34
salimmadjd wrote: post #2

This could be very troubling for scrapers, as they frequently breach the terms of service. If successfully prosecuted it would encourage and empower sites with content that get scraped to push for criminal charges and win given this precedence.

Keep in mind that his alleged actions go way behind scraping. He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content. I sympathize with his goals, but I have to wonder what he was thinking. If the goal was liberating the information and I was in his shoes, I would have found a much more paranoid way to go about it. MIT is a very open environment,…

>He allegedly broke into an MIT network closet to install his own hardware, so as to avoid IP-based restrictions on the content.

Maybe you should read the original indictment instead of throwing around conclusions not found in evidence.

Re: Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case

#40

Post by tptacek »

sp332 wrote: post #32
raldi wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty sure sneaking into a server closet and patching your computer into their network was already against the law before this incident happened.

It was a janitorial closet, not a server room. And connecting to a network is not illegal.

No, but scraping all the articles off JSTOR using MIT's negotiated access in order to put them onto BitTorrent sure is.
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