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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

#261

Post by sillysaurusx »

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.

I'm not sure if this is meant as some kind of "gotcha," but the legal system doesn't work that way. He wasn't rotating his MAC address as a default practice. He changed the last byte of his MAC only when he noticed he was banned from the network.

Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did.

All of this is in the indictment, which is worth reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...

Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today.

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

#262

Post by jongjong »

arionhardison wrote: post #205
unpop wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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 "…

Yes. 100%, the idea that we are all equal under the law is a joke.

And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.

So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.

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

#263

Post by thomasjeff1 »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #261
greyface- wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not sure if this is meant as some kind of "gotcha," but the legal system doesn't work that way. He wasn't rotating his MAC address as a default practice. He changed the last byte of his MAC only when he noticed he was banned from the network. Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it mea…

From your sourced link.

> JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal.

If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law?

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

#264

Post by JackFr »

anthonyrstevens wrote: post #112
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>> 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.

Congress (and state legislatures) pass laws, but don’t necessarily authorize the resources to prosecute all offenders, so prosecutors are given some latitude who to target.

IANAL, but my understanding is this: Malicious prosecution is a defense. Selective enforcement is not. The difference is for judges and juries to decide.

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

#265

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

jongjong wrote: post #254
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.

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 th…

>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but

The 1860s?

Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?

This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.

>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't

Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...

But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.

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

#266

Post by j16sdiz »

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.

This is basically asking for discovery of another case when you are being suing for one case.

I think the US court system is famous for being slow. Not sure if anyone wants to make it go even slower.

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

#267

Post by jacquesm »

derekdahmer wrote: post #259
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.

But not the training data.

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

#269

Post by 93po »

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…

I strongly dislike this comment because it's the type of thing some anonynmous person can post online with no credibility or accountability and massively mischaracterize a situation to downplay the very awful things that people did to Aaron and instead place more of the blame on him. We saw the same shit happen constantly with Julian Assange.
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