Aaron Swartz hit with 9 more felony charges in MIT hacking case • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by tptacek » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:30 PM UTC

aggronn wrote: post #53

tptacek wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't knowingly break the terms of service of websites for profit or to harm others. Sounds straightforward to me.

If a restaurant had a 'terms of service' that said no reselling of food that they make, should you be open to federal prosecution if you stopped by to pick up food for yourself and some co-workers? Especially if someone gave you a few dollars for the trouble of running the errand? And even more, if the restaurant has their own delivery service? Am I missing an important distinction here? Should private companies be a…

I can't reply to this because no part of the example you provided constitutes a federal crime under the CFAA.

On the other hand, the criminal aspect of using a university's noncommercial JSTOR access to scrape a substantial portion of the entire database so you can put it on BitTorrent is not hard to understand.

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

#62

Post by tptacek » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:31 PM UTC

rjurney wrote: post #60

Remember the FREE KEVIN bumper stickers? FREE AARON. Just to elaborate... what it seems we have here is a brilliant engineer and idealist leftie that lost his grip on what is reasonable. He seriously fucked up, and then he seriously fucked up by getting caught. He isn't a hardened criminal, he wasn't stealing to make money and he can almost certainly be reformed with a light sentence, community service and probation.…

Aaron isn't incarcerated.

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

#63

Post by nitrogen » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:31 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #20

danielweber wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, merely violating a ToS, by itself, is not criminal. Lori Drew isn't binding on the whole country, but it is precedent.

You don't even need Lori Drew to arrive at this conclusion. The CFAA doesn't create strict liability crimes. You have to know you're violating the ToS, and, more than that, you have to benefit (or materially harm someone).

...you have to benefit (or materially harm someone).

Are benefit and harm legally defined terms in this instance, or can a clever prosecutor convince a jury of the criminal equivalent of the idea that making a phone with rounded rectangles is worth $1B?

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

#64

Post by nitrogen » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

__del__ wrote: post #46

I'm not sure I want to live in a society where reading too many academic papers too fast is a multi-felony. "Swartz’s program was so powerful…"

Never let the truth get in the way of a good narrative. Your quotation reminds me of statements made in the case against the Wall Street quant who allegedly stole some source code from his former employer (was it GS?). The prosecutor was quoted as saying (paraphrased from memory), "This is so important, they call it their secret sauce." As if calling something "secret sauce" alone is enough to determine the importance of a trade secret.

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

#65

Post by tptacek » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:34 PM UTC

biot wrote: post #41

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.

Are you suggesting that mere scraping alone would demonstrate sufficient intent to warrant prosecution? Can you elaborate? Various courts have had mixed interpretations on the enforceability of sites' terms of service. How would this impact the body of case law that has been building around automated scrapers such as the many "... vs Google" cases? Also, "precedence" is ranking something in priority; "precedent" is t…

The indictment goes into great detail as to how Swartz would have known his actions violated JSTOR's terms, and how he repeatedly took surreptitious steps to continue his plan despite the obvious efforts of both MIT and JSTOR to stop him.

"Mere scraping alone" is unlikely to land you a federal charge; the prosecution needs to demonstrate your intent to act unlawfully. A far more typical outcome for a scraping case is a C&D from the site you scraped.

For obvious reasons, JSTOR can't C&D Swartz once their content hits BitTorrent. Similarly, if you scrape a site and post it to file sharing networks, you might have something to be concerned about.

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

#66

Post by tptacek » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:35 PM UTC

nitrogen wrote: post #63

tptacek wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even need Lori Drew to arrive at this conclusion. The CFAA doesn't create strict liability crimes. You have to know you're violating the ToS, and, more than that, you have to benefit (or materially harm someone).

...you have to benefit (or materially harm someone). Are benefit and harm legally defined terms in this instance, or can a clever prosecutor convince a jury of the criminal equivalent of the idea that making a phone with rounded rectangles is worth $1B?

Yes, they are defined.

Moreover, no part of the indictment relies on silly things like the billion dollar valuation of rounded rectangles.

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

#67

Post by Homunculiheaded » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:37 PM UTC

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…

Just to add a data point that I usually find is missing in this discussion: US Academic Libraries spend nearly $2 Billion/year on serials[0]. And if you look the rate with which that expenditure increases is pretty amazing.

[0] http://library.tumblr.com/post/16817715155/rising-cost-of-se...

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

#68

Post by udpheaders » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:43 PM UTC

__del__ wrote: post #46

I'm not sure I want to live in a society where reading too many academic papers too fast is a multi-felony. "Swartz’s program was so powerful…"

As if Python was the most powerful language, heh. :)

Maybe he was going for a world record of most citations in a single paper. Who's to say he wasn't just doing research? How many downloads is too many?

I would be willing to bet that the JSTOR TOS do not give a specific number. e.g. "You may not download more than n papers in 24 hours." And if they don't state a maximum in the TOS, then why shouldn't they, for clarity?

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

#69

Post by raldi » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:46 PM UTC

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.

You're asserting that it's legal for you to plug your computer into a piece of networking infrastructure that's clearly not intended for general public use, without the permission of that network's owner?

I'm going to have to slap a [citation needed] on that.

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

#70

Post by cube13 » Wed, Sep 19, 2012, 7:46 PM UTC

mukaiji wrote: post #56

cube13 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, but those who carry out the peer-review, are the researchers themselves: at times, at little to no cost to the publisher, simply because the reviewing scientist (and the postdoc she/he usually assigns to do the grunt work) get the "prestige" of being a reviewer/editor for a given publication.

And? That's the definition of a peer.

There seem to be two issues here that are being conflated.

The first is the value of peer review. I don't agree with the arguments that having a select group of people, who are experts in their fields, reviewing papers is a bad thing. Nor do I think that opening it up will result in anything other than a terrible amount of noise.

The second argument is over the necessity of for-pay journals. Here, I think there could be a lot of work... if the new journal still provides the same amount of review and scrutiny as the current ones.