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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

#351

Post by necovek »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #326
necovek wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure speeding ticket fines have never been established based on economic or emotional harm (how much does 200 lives lost cost? is it their accumulated net worth? expected earnings through what would have been left of their careers? how about lost limbs, emotional damage etc? and how can you even be sure how much has speeding and not something else mainly contributed to the harm)

> I am pretty sure speeding ticket fines have never been established based on economic or emotional harm Probably not, but we can look at the averages anyway. > how much does 200 lives lost cost? is it their accumulated net worth? expected earnings through what would have been left of their careers? how about lost limbs, emotional damage etc? 200 statistical lives are worth about 2 billion dollars. That question has…

I am not saying it's impossible to come up with numbers, but that they will be somewhat made-up.

You'd also need to amortize the damages over years, and then spread it to all the speeding tickets issued.

So I'd actually simplify it: if we say $40000 billion (11k deaths annually times $2b plus non-deaths too and financial damages to cars and infrastructure) of damages amortized over 10 years and spread to 40M tickets annually in USA, that's actually around $100k average per speeding ticket.

I'd also note that we can't assume worst possible impact as there will be combined offenses too — eg. simultaneous drunk driving and speeding — and this means that some damages need to be covered by drunk driving ticket instead :)

Edit: update numbers to reflect annual deaths attributed to speeding in US.

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

#352

Post by marysol5 »

irishcoffee wrote: post #87
cortesoft wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't believe his lawyer didn't explain all of that to him? An important role for an attorney in this situation is as a counselor, to explain the actual reality and the possibilities.

I have had the misfortune of hiring many attorneys for a variety of different legal issues. They’re almost always fucking useless.

I can attest to this.

My duty solicitor on the day of my arrest kept making comment that he believed I committed the accused offence (I didn't). Mostly because he didn't understand it it, so that's proof enough it seems.

He then sent me a letter outlining what he understood, which outright stated he believed I did it (again, I didn't). Dropped him like a hot stone when I got charged, and paid for my own. Who after some research was actually half-good.

Then the barrister I had at trial said "You'll likely go down, the judge you have is a bastard, and has sent a lot down", great..

And now when I'm trying to get some reconciliation for all this nonsense. The legal firm I hired to sue, are ignoring my instructions and went for something entirely different and offering a whopping £1000 compensation.

My legal costs alone were many times that

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

#353

Post by marysol5 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #137
irishcoffee wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had the misfortune of hiring many attorneys for a variety of different legal issues. They’re almost always fucking useless.

The trouble with lawyers is that their quality varies tremendously but the client has very little ability to tell the difference until after it's too late. In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.

Here in the UK we have "Duty Solicitors", who are on-call in the police station should you need them.

Problem is, the pay out from the government for their services is atrocious, so not many are willing to go onto the list. And the ones who are, aren't the good ones.

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

#354

Post by marysol5 »

Quarrelsome wrote: post #97
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…

the sentences that US courts dream up around digital offences are absolutely obscene and seem to only exist as a means of coercion. However because they're still technically real and it feels disgusting.

Not in this case, also why because it's "digital" does it change anything.

SWATing is "digital" but leads to very real death

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

#355

Post by marysol5 »

9x39 wrote: post #106
Quarrelsome wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the sentences that US courts dream up around digital offences are absolutely obscene and seem to only exist as a means of coercion. However because they're still technically real and it feels disgusting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._... The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal. He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera. I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someon…

He'd been caught once already, then continued and went around ever barrier they put in place to try and stop him.

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

#356

Post by mcv »

account42 wrote: post #350
mcv wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people were always there. Just stop oppressing them. They don't need "special protections", just the same rights as everybody else. Why is it so important to have an oppressed class?

You can't just call everything oppression to force people to go along with your views. And no, progressives haven't wanted the same rights for everyone for decades. The spiel has been all about giving them more rights to compensate for perceived (often hereditary) oppression for too long that anyone can claim that with a straight face.

I don't call everything oppression, I only call oppression oppression. Slavery was oppression. Jim Crow was oppression. Discrimination against Irish, Italians, Hispanics and black people was and is oppression. Denying people the right to be who they are, restricting their rights based on who they are, denying them rights that other people enjoy, is oppression.

The issue is that conservatives have always tried to force people to go along with their views, and reacted with oppression and violence towards anyone who didn't fit into their straightjacket.

> progressives haven't wanted the same rights for everyone for decades

It's been a developing journey. It started with rights for people who weren't noble born, then men who weren't rich, then women and ethnic minorities, then gay people, then transgender people. It's a gradual expansion of rights until everybody is able to enjoy the same rights.

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

#357

Post by mlrtime »

jacquesm wrote: post #244
geodel wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, how did it work our for countries where it did took root?

Good enough, France, the Nordics and many other countries besides have done well.

"Done well", but not as good as the US. [depending on which stats you cherry-pick]

The US was always about dreamers taking big risks for big rewards. There are a lot of things that can be fixed that don't remove that ceiling that other countries have.

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

#358

Post by lofaszvanitt »

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…

And that warrants a 7-8 years sentence, without a plea? Maybe in a police state.

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

#359

Post by Zambyte »

> Swartz' use case was the dissemination and archival of knowledge; Meta's use case is powering up their proprietary plagiarism code

It's hard to imagine a world where Aaron is still around, and he is not a huge fan of LLMs. He'd probably be writing software to make local inference as accessible as possible. I have personally made the same parallel between the treatment of Aaron and the behavior of modern AI studios, but I believe the better conclusion to arrive at is that we should abolish copyright, since it is a fundamentally unjust system designed by people in power, for people in power. Not that we should be litigiously bullying AI scientists into suicide the same way as was done to Aaron.

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

#360

Post by elmer2 »

The difference is that companies can either sue or contact Meta to get the content removed (this happens every day)

This isn't possible when you break into a computer room and steal their files.

The mental gymnaistics people go through to support an asshole that just did what he felt like and wouldn't work witin the system is astounding.

Aaron Swartz should have started a company that supported the free flow of journalim/information.

Instead, he chose to act like a child and steal it instead.

While his death is tragic, he's not someone we should be supporting.

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