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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

#171

Post by frogperson »

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…

the government is made up of the people. the people are mostly greedy because our culture worships wealth. broken people, broken culture, broken government.

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

#172

Post by greyface- »

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…

> trespassed into a room

A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/.

> rotated his MAC address

Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.

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

#173

Post by collingreen »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #131
GolfPopper wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.

Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer. Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.

It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm.

It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed.

Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?

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

#174

Post by FireBeyond »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #131
GolfPopper wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.

Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer. Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.

This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes.

Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).

The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.

It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.

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

#175

Post by amiga386 »

quickthrowman wrote: post #96
amiga386 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far This is what happens when they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal > Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of…

For some insane reason I am unable to comprehend, the UK government still allows Fujitsu to bid on government software contracts, despite being responsible for all of the false imprisonments, trauma, and tragedy you laid you in your post. https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-govern...

I understand the government would have difficulty excluding Fujitsu under its own procurement regulations at the time (Public Contracts Regulations 2015). Fujitsu voluntarily withdrew its bids in 2024. The goverment passed the Procurement Act 2023 which came into force in February 2025 and there is now a national debarment list, though I note Fujitsu isn't on it.

Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its own subpostmasters.

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

#176

Post by tpmoney »

quietsignal wrote: post #46
tpmoney wrote: post #21

Ok and so what? We have been informed of an injustice, we are now angry. Now what? What do we want? Do we agree that the prosecution was unjust and wrong, celebrate that Meta is not being criminally prosecuted, lash out at the publishers filing the lawsuit and advocate for an official apology from the prosecutors and government that went after Aaron? Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselve…

I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no? As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produ…

> I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no?

But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him?

We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".

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

#177

Post by FireBeyond »

RachelF wrote: post #92
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…

Remember it was MIT that dobbed him in. MIT then helped the criminal prosecution even after JSTOR settled with him. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case...

I mean he was arrested initially not for the material downloaded but the fact that he, not an MIT student, was found hiding in a facilities closet with his laptop hooked into the network.

I get that MIT's police were meant to join him in a chorus of "Information wants to be free", but let's not act like it's unreasonable to want someone arrested or prosecuted who was not authorized to be in an equipment closet with their computer wired into a switch.

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

#178

Post by FireBeyond »

greyface- wrote: post #172
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…

> trespassed into a room A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/ . > rotated his MAC address Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.

Were those hackers MIT students? Was Aaron?

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

#179

Post by 9x39 »

pdonis wrote: post #167
9x39 wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers That's the root, but I think what Swartz actually did was anger someone at MIT, who called the Secret Service. The federal involvement persisted even after JSTOR and the state quit, and they had him served on a plate with MIT's help. You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned phone call, as it turns out.

> I think what Swartz actually did was anger someone at MIT, who called the Secret Service. MIT was concerned that someone (they didn't know who it was at the time--in fact IIRC they didn't find out until the police told them after they caught Swartz) was using their network in a suspicious way. I don't know that anyone was "angered". > You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned ph…

MIT evidently added a camera. Later that day, the MIT police made their first contact with him.

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

"When it was discovered, a video camera was placed in the room to record Swartz; his computer was left untouched. The recording was stopped once Swartz was identified,"

IME, months-long internal investigations in an org with Secret Service involvement would be unlikely to escape senior management, but I'm just speculating and only have the same info as everyone else. You might be right.

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

#180

Post by s1artibartfast »

pdonis wrote: post #165
s1artibartfast wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge. Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.

> Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access. So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding. Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't exp…

It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists.

It is fine to want for something to be different, but that doesn't change the facts of how they are.

It's fine to advocate future papers be made public. I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. The word for this is expostfacto recontracting, and undermines just about any system of law where is used.

Last, there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Free public access is often the least of those concerns. Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.

To understand this better, consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding. The government might rightly calculate that it is in the public interest too help a for-profit company develop a cancer cure with grants, then have no cure at all.

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