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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

#251

Post by yepyeppers »

jacquesm wrote: post #243

Because he planned to make the data public, Meta just wants to use it to enrich its shareholders. See also: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and every other big player in this space besides.

There’s also the fact that Swartz was physically trespassing and attaching unauthorized machines into networking closets to run scraping on a university network to exfiltrate the scrapes to the public, versus just scraping public facing web from the public web to train a model. That’s a little different and while the feds were heavy-handed against Swartz these computer crime laws were well known and it was less heavy handed than the hacker crackdowns of the 90s if you want to look at precedents.

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

#252

Post by m4rtink »

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.

Fall of the Roman Empire took hundreds of years and long tomes have been written about it.

In this case it looks like there would not be enough material even for a thin paperback.

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

#253

Post by skinfaxi »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #235
skinfaxi wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think part of the balance is that law requires discretion because humans are not good at making deny lists which the law boils down to.

That's just conceding that you don't actually want to have laws and really only want to punish people when you don't like them.

That's pretty reductive. Or do you not see a difference for example between someone speeding to get to the hospital vs speeding to elude police after a bank robbery?

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

#254

Post by jongjong »

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.

It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body.

A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.

Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.

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

#255

Post by chanux »

charcircuit wrote: post #201
jmward01 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Perfect may not be possible but with AI society will be able to scale law enforcement to way more than what a few individual officers can handle.

And it will still have the amazing characteristics we see today.

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

#256

Post by necovek »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #237
FireBeyond wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Even flat-out rejecting the desire to charge them more wouldn't be bending over backwards for them. It would simply be charging them based on harm done rather than what affects them. And the post you're responding to is making a much less extreme position, that it's hard to scale the fine properly.

With laws, you generally want to charge and cover for the harm done, but also to disincentivise law breaking.

For instance, someone might be significantly speeding for 10 years, and never hurting anyone or causing any harm (financial or otherwise). Should they pay nothing?

Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?

But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?

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

#257

Post by talon8635 »

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…

I believe JSTOR did, and then backed off after public outcry. JSTOR is not an admirable operation, for this and many other reasons.

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

#258

Post by _DeadFred_ »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #109
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.

> 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 enforc…

Our system has that built in. You can only be punished as to the norm and standards, findings can create precedent for other cases, etc. The workaround is they just use an 'as applied standard' so that it only can 'apply' to the one case due to that case's unique 'circumstances'. They do it all the time to prevent precedents from being set. 'As applied' rules are excluded from setting precedent.

As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to prevent establishing legal norms from judicial findings the way our system is supposed to.

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

#259

Post by derekdahmer »

jacquesm wrote: post #243

Because he planned to make the data public, Meta just wants to use it to enrich its shareholders. See also: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and every other big player in this space besides.

Meta has opened sourced almost all of their models trained on this data.

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

#260

Post by talon8635 »

Melatonic wrote: post #162
badlibrarian wrote: post #133

I don't like talking about this, but first hand knowledge is rarer by the day, and there are entire organizations profiting off this mythology. It's pissing me off. Aaron is not a data point to build stupid metaphors around. He was a bright and broken child. Aaron attracted influential and creepy people and was ill-equipped to handle it. He was also working through a period of sexual awakening while being used by old…

Can you give any more details ? I've never heard about this but sad if true

There is a great documentary about him (The Internets Own Boy) and a book (The Idealist)
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