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Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

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Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#71

Post by Jskewel »

jmclnx wrote: post #50
Razengan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real shame is that the next "best" countries are.. China? and the European countries pushing for age verification and sweeping surveillance and apparently bent on destroying the freedoms that made them better than China & Russia.. God can we have an alien invasion already please

>God can we have an alien invasion already please I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end. As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a c…

"there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end"

OK doomer

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#72

Post by cortesoft »

arionhardison wrote: post #8
milkytron wrote: post #3

The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him. There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in…

Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk. If we were to finally stand up and say that justice for all…

I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#73

Post by mcv »

I recently came to the conclusion that it was never about copyright. It's about corporate control, about punishing contempt for business model.

Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. All the kids sued by the MAFIAA were punished because they disrespected a business model. Copyright was merely the mechanism to make it stick. But AI companies and Meta can disrespect copyright all they want, because in their case, it serves a corporate business model, and those hurt or disenfranchised by it are regular people or much smaller companies.

The law doesn't exist to protect the weak from the powerful, but to enable the powerful to punish the weak.

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#74

Post by aeve890 »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #64
sillysaurusx wrote: post #60

He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filt…

Information should be free.

What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#75

Post by [deleted] »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #60

He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filt…

[deleted]

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#76

Post by mcv »

ignoramous wrote: post #28
arionhardison wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk. If we were to finally stand up and say that justice for all…

> large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt: Every industrial & commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps ... The ordinary English wor…

The exact same mechanism is used to keep poor white Americans voting Republican: even if they're poor, they see themselves as the white ruling class over black and Hispanic people, despite the fact that they themselves are kept poor by the real ruling class.

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#77

Post by voakbasda »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #60

He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filt…

Wasn’t Meta found to be scraping from addresses that were not immediately traceable back to them?

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#78

Post by ninjahawk1 »

I think that large companies having next to no consequences is in large part due to capitalism doing what it does over a long period of time. There’s a deeper and deeper consolidation of money and power the longer time goes on it seems like.

If we think back to the various lawsuits Facebook has gone through, they paid out about $10 or so per individual affected, totaling a few hundred million dollars, which they would make in a couple months for selling user data and whatnot.

This is something that every company gets away with mainly I think because of just how large their wealth actually is. It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. Punishing an individual is easy.

I don’t know if there’s really a solution at this point, maybe we could’ve prevented this reality at some point in the past but I don’t think that without actual global collapse it would be something that can be retroactively changed, and I don’t know if global collapse would necessarily lead to a better future.

I think that for one, Zuckerberg should be in prison, if someone oversees a massive theft like this, I think they should be held criminally liable. Same the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI for their parts in the massive theft that took place. They should all be doing prison time.

The reason I don’t think they will is that their investors probably have a good amount of leverage over anyone who would prosecute them, so it would never make it that far.

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#79

Post by MattDamonSpace »

PenguinCoder wrote: post #64
sillysaurusx wrote: post #60

He wasn’t prosecuted for scraping. He trespassed into a room with a router, plugged his laptop into it, downloaded papers as quickly as possible, and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him. That’s very different from downloading a webpage on the open internet. I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filt…

Information should be free.

“People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”

Re: Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

#80

Post by jmward01 »

giantg2 wrote: post #63
arionhardison wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice. I totally agree that this was wrong and he should not have been prosecuted but a large part of the effort that dealt this injustice to him was facilitated by the fact that the vast majority of people willfully turn a blind eye when the same thing or worse happens to people are not of their ilk. If we were to finally stand up and say that justice for all…

"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice." The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.

Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed.

Reality should always have a place in the law.

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