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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

#141

Post by opello »

jmward01 wrote: post #80
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.

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…

[dead]

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

#142

Post by maximinus_thrax »

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…

> and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him

And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is.

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

#143

Post by salawat »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #118
anthonyrstevens wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is repealed and no one can be charged with it anymore. This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.

If you're going to say things like that you have to give examples.

You just created a large, TBTF corp's veto. Pass a law or have a law passed a corp TBTF doesn't want? Break it and force the Government's hand to strike it down.

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

#144

Post by pdonis »

gertop wrote: post #126
Quarrelsome wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case. If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get…

You keep shifting the goal posts... He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts. Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.

> He did something illegal

Read the book Three Felonies A Day. The law is so bloated now that we all do illegal things all the time, we can't help it.

What Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers that should be in the public domain to begin with, because we paid for the research already with our tax money. The fact that such information is considered "proprietary" and JSTOR and other companies are able to keep it locked behind paywalls is an outrage.

Further, after Swartz returned all the material he had downloaded and agreed not to do it again, both JSTOR and MIT said they were satisfied and no further action was needed (though JSTOR was more emphatic about it than MIT was). Which, combined with the above, should have ended the case then and there.

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

#145

Post by 9x39 »

63stack wrote: post #119
9x39 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, intent matters. Evading security matters. It's a big point that his actions were intentional and not passive or accidental - not that IP infringement by corporations isn't its own discussion.

Sure intent matters but I still don't see how this warrants the government going after him.

MIT called up the government and said there's this guy. Whether they should have is debatable, but they did.

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

#146

Post by drivebyhooting »

DivingForGold wrote: post #139
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…

In many cases it's "all about the money" (and the lawyers). Take the case of Billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors who was famously pursued by federal prosecutors as their ultimate "white whale" in a massive insider trading probe. Though his firm pleaded guilty and paid a record $1.8 billion fine, Cohen himself was never criminally charged or convicted. Yet two lower underlings were c…

That’s infuriating.

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

#147

Post by DivingForGold »

ninjahawk1 wrote: post #78

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 woul…

ZUCK: PUBLIC ENEMY # 1

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

#148

Post by [deleted] »

gertop wrote: post #126
Quarrelsome wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case. If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get…

You keep shifting the goal posts... He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts. Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by Quarrelsome »

gertop wrote: post #126
Quarrelsome wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case. If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get…

You keep shifting the goal posts... He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts. Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.

I think you're being hysterical. Getting threatened for 35 years in jail is absurd for the crime. Stating "oh well it would never have actually _been_ 35 years" is akin to pretending to punch someone and stopping just before you hit them and then mocking them for flinching.

> I wasn't _actually_ going to hit you, quit being a baby.

Which is why its actually illegal to do that to people in a lot of places.

My issue is that the sentence is artificial and used for intimidation as opposed to being a rational basis for a justice system. Hence the mafia analogy.

Imagine if the US had a maximum sentence of 35 years for mere possession of a firearm but in practice, it would only be used in very unlikely conditions. It wouldn't last a minute. It's only allowed to be like this because nobody cares about tech.

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