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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

#101

Post by 9x39 »

watwut wrote: post #85
Barrin92 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not the OP but the heaviest charges against Swartz didn't stem from his IP infringement, it was wire fraud and computer fraud. He used a network access and MIT guest account he didn't have legal access to because he wasn't affiliated with the institution, which enabled the CFAA charges.

Expecting the prosecution for HuggingFace incident soon. Or at least full investigation whether it was accident Must be any day now Like common. You know full well that large companies can commit staggering amounts of fraud.

Is HuggingFace reaching out to the FBI for assistance to prosecute OpenAI?

What does the claim that large companies can commit large frauds have to do with anything?

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

#102

Post by msftgreed »

MattDamonSpace wrote: post #79
PenguinCoder wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Information should be free.

“People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”

You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it.

Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!

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

#103

Post by edoceo »

genghisjahn wrote: post #94
giantg2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

For the in-crowd the law protects but does not bind. For the out-crowd, the law binds but does not protect. Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.

Maybe from here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12517091-conservatism-consi...

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

#104

Post by josh_p »

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…

Yes, he did that. He also settled the problem with jstor, returned the files as part of a civil settlement.

This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy.

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

#105

Post by whatsThisBtn4 »

Razengan wrote: post #18
buran77 wrote: post #14

The US has normalized so much moral rot and legal breaches in the past few years, all in the interest of making more money... Rarely does a country degrade so much, so fast, and I'm afraid this isn't even the low mark.

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

China?

Not sure if Chinese propaganda got you or what.

They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.

The United States kills 4 of their own people and the news outlets go wild.

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

#106

Post by 9x39 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #97
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…

the sentences that US courts dream up around digital offences are absolutely obscene and seem to only exist as a means of coercion. However because they're still technically real and it feels disgusting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...

The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.

He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera.

I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.

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

#107

Post by pixelready »

genghisjahn wrote: post #94
giantg2 wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

For the in-crowd the law protects but does not bind. For the out-crowd, the law binds but does not protect. Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

colordrops wrote: post #91
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…

Why is that fundamentally different?

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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.

> If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.

In order to do this you need to have laws that are designed to be reasonable for people to actually follow instead of laws that are designed to allow prosecutors to find a violation whenever they want to.

Actually enforcing them would create pressure to do that, but it would also create pressure to go back to selective enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws.

A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore.

Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.

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

#110

Post by mmorriso »

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…

The real issue is that in the US, everything is for sale.
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