211–220 of 427 posts
This is not true. From the prosecutor's testimony:
there was never an intention for him to go to jail for longer than a three, four, potentially five-month range.Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels.
The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement.
And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.
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…
> repeatedly broke in to a room > rotated his MAC address Do you really think these details drastically change how people should judge his actions vs those of a corporation?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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The point here is that as you stated: "you still do not understand". For those of us that have been under the thumb of the judicial system it can feel like the world is on you. We have no idea of his mental state, we have no idea of the nuance or motivation but what I do think we know is that the actions of the state here far exceeded any interpretation of what would be deemed an appropriate punishment for the said "…
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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pprpd3x96o
https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0214-chevrons-environmenta...
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is effectively how all federal sentencing and reporting about that sentencing works, all the time. A lawyer blogger Popehat has talked about this for years[1]. Headlines pull add up all charges and the maximum statutory sentences for those and report it as if that's even remotely close to a likely outcome and it's not. In fact, Popehat actually wrote about that as it applied to Swartz in the aftermath of his suicide[2].
If you read about the Swartz prosecution, you saw people decrying the fact
that he was facing 35 years in prison. That's more than rapists and murders
serve, they say. But they are talking about the maximum possible sentences,
not any sentence he was remotely likely to get. Recently in the context of
another case I explained how federal sentencing works, and how it's driven by
an arcane set of rules producing a recommendation that federal judges often
follow — rules that on most occasions produce a result well below the
maximum possible sentence.
[1]: https://www.popehat.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sentenci...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150604204913/http://www.popeha...
I don't think it matters much for the argument, which is valid (or not) regardless of whether you get the precise facts about the Swartz prosecution right, but Swartz was not facing 35 years. That's the statutory maximum sentence you'd get if you ignored the sentencing guidelines and grouped none of the charges, which is not how anything works. The prosecutors threatening Swartz and his attorneys claimed they'd pursu…
I bristle as well when essays like this state that he "was effectively assassinated by our legal system" While I think there are a lot of good arguments that the prosecution was excessive and meant to create a chilling effect, it is a huge leap to say they assassinated him. He was clearly already vulnerable when this happened, or he would have never resorted to taking his own life when there were still so many avenue…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the root problem is Corporations being Legal Persons. An alternative would be the CEO to be the “legal person” of each Corp. and be the one against all legal actions should be targeted. In that case it would Zack himself the one facing any legal action. A Corp’s actions result to the death of a person. CEO should be trialed as if they were the one driving the car.
The issue is limited liability. I don't think companies should shield stockholder, shareholders, or owners from any liability
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is Meta using BitTorrent to download over 80 terabytes of copyrighted books while avoiding using corporate IP addresses not evading security?
Torrents are openly accessible, even if .gov might enable infringement claims by the rights-holder. They're not hacking into networks. Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult. The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose…
To borrow your words, intent matters.
Also why are we acting as if Meta wasn’t doing this for over half a decade and that companies don’t actively take steps to try and prevent piracy?