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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

#291

Post by wyre »

93po wrote: post #269
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.

The post isn't downplaying the things that people did to Aaron though?

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

#292

Post by rib3ye »

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…

The core argument makes a lot more sense when you compare Aaron’s pirating via network closet with Meta’s pirating via BitTorrent.

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

#293

Post by infinite_spin »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #276
thomasjeff1 wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It was free for MIT students but paid for everyone else, I believe. That's why he needed to jack into MIT's network.

JSTOR was free for the public as well, but had a per-day download cap, which IIRC was 3 papers.

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

#294

Post by s1artibartfast »

silver_sun wrote: post #240
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.

>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. I think a better analogy for this situation is: The public donates food, then the recipient, after being fed, sells access to (infinite cheaply replicable copies of) said food for a profit. The public in this case just wants to have said food.

Maybe we are better off avoiding the analogies.

The public gives them cash for terms of a grant. If those dont include an open access paper, it is unreasonable to demand it after the fact. It certainly doesn't give a right to go take take their papers (or whatever they made).

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

#295

Post by AngryData »

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…

To me his crime is the equivalent of sneaking into a public library with a photocopier and copying down books without having a library card. It is not and should not be that serious. Is it annoying? Yes. Should he have gotten in a bit of trouble? Sure. But nothing like what he was charged with or dealt with. They hammered down serious law on this guy for what should of at worse been a petty crime.

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

#296

Post by gib444 »

spelk wrote: post #2

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, but I honestly wish these could be used to prosecute people who are treated differently for the same crime because of their status, or at least set a precedent that such activities are definitively okay.

In England, private prosecutions are used regularly by the railway. The threat of prosecution lets them do a shakedown to extract sums from people

It was less bizarre when they were all private companies, but now many are owned by the government!

Some of them have successfully prosecuted people over a £0 difference in fare

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

#297

Post by protocolture »

9x39 wrote: post #136
josh_p wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, he did that. He also settled the problem with jstor, returned the files as part of a civil settlement. This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy.

MIT was another affected party, who reached out to the government for help.

Please sir, we lost entire megabytes of bandwidth as someone accessed free resources on the internet, we are such an aggreieved party.

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

#298

Post by derekdahmer »

jacquesm wrote: post #267
derekdahmer wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

But not the training data.

Not sure what your point is - the articles they trained on are copyrighted and not theirs to open source. The only they can legally open source is the weights, which they have done repeatedly.

My point is both Aaron was trying to make the journals public and Meta made models that encapsulate data from the journals public.

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

#299

Post by mapt »

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.

The violation of the law as practiced is that a Little Person did this and threatened a Player's profits. A Player can do what they like to another and form some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement afterward... but Schwartz did not have enough commas in his bank account to be allowed to dabble, not a single investor behind him. Nor was his goal the overriding morally correct goal of maximizing social stratification through profit seeking. Knocking down paywalls is dead weight loss, not market predation. He had to go. He had to be made an example of. For the system, this was personal.

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

#300

Post by keeda »

rpdillon wrote: post #186
keeda wrote: post #181

A key aspect folks should understand about US Copyright Law is that it much more severely penalizes infringement with distributing, or an intent to distribute, unauthorized copies than to just consume privately. Distributing unauthorized copies is a federal crime (which can escalate to a felony based on various factors) whereas doing whatever for private use is usually a much milder civil liability. If you look at al…

> Distributing unauthorized is a federal crime Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call. Aaron Swartz was the victim of a witch hunt, plain and simple. The prosecutor that came after him (Carmen Ortiz) has never suffered any negative consequences for coming after him in such an injust way. She should.

> Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call.

I don't think it's a judgment call, the level to escalate seems to be pretty specific and at an extremely low scale, specifically unauthorized distribution "of at least 10 copies OR 1 or more copyrighted works with a retail value > $2,500" and the penalties are pretty severe, including imprisonment for "up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both."

https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...

I'd say Aaron Swartz had crossed that bar pretty thoroughly.

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