Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.curiousquail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 427 posts

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

#371

Post by goldie_wilson »

alightsoul wrote: post #285
goldie_wilson wrote: post #185

Maybe I'm missing something, but didn't Aaron break into an MIT network closet and then spoof and use exploits to secure data vs Meta who is just scraping everything that can be found on the public web. I despise just about everything Meta does, but it seems like people are quick to compare two situations that are not identical so they can further their "big corp and America = bad" agendas.

Oh my god I have seen this argument here repeated so many times with different rephrasings. I do not want to believe it is a bot or astroturfing.

Definitely not a bot. I'm just tired of seeing this community becoming another reddit echo chamber for ideology that is disassociated from reality. The actions here are two completely different cases. You want to talk about whether or not 35 years was appropriate for Aaron's crime, great, that's a valid discussion. If you want to argue whether AI training sets violate fair use, awesome, another completely valid civil law discussion. But thinking that what Aaron did is comparable to Meta scraping is a completely hollow narrative. It relies on total ignorance of what crimes Aaron committed even if he and others believed they were committed for an altruistic reason. Society would collapse if we just ignored crime because the criminal was doing what they thought was a good thing.

Furthermore this whole post is using Aaron as a strawman to further the argument that big corporations = bad. While its true that the very nature of a big corporation is to minmax (gaming term if you are unfamiliar) with the max being profit and min being everything else, they are not inherently evil and the argument is an over simplification of a much larger more complex situation. Anyone who simply believes they inherently bad shouldn't be posting online because all of the hardware and services required to do so demonstrates their complacency in contributing to these large corporations and makes them a hypocrite.

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

#372

Post by hnfong »

Might be weird to make this comment on a YC hosted forum, but cases like these made me realize understand why startups like to bring in "investors" with some political clout.

Not for the money per se, but for... like... "protection".

I mean, of course they're not going to sue Meta (or the other big AI players), but if you're a startup, it probably helps to have someone with influence as an investor so maybe authorities would give your company some slack.

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

#373

Post by ninjahawk1 »

deaux wrote: post #284
ninjahawk1 wrote: post #78

I think that large companies having next to no consequences is in large part due to capitalism doing what it does over a long period of time. There’s a deeper and deeper consolidation of money and power the longer time goes on it seems like. If we think back to the various lawsuits Facebook has gone through, they paid out about $10 or so per individual affected, totaling a few hundred million dollars, which they woul…

> It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. It's not at all. There is zero reason this couldn't be applied to Zuck. [0] There's also no reason why fines couldn't be 10% of global revenue, or more. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/evergrande-found...

I agree that they should, my point is that it’s difficult for several real logistical reasons. These companies for one do a large amount of lobbying and fundraising for political campaigns, they do control most digital infrastructure, with AI expanding are securing multi trillion dollar datacenter funds, etc.

There’s a ton of money at stake for the weathly aristocrats. They push politicians to delay or do things in favor of the companies above the people, and like I already said punishment is hard specifically because how do you fine someone with infinite money? They will just get more.

That’s not a punishment. I think that personal liability to the actual CEOs is the only way to get around this, leadership is generally never held responsible which means they can do whatever they want and the company bails out their greedy decisions.

It’s late stage capitalism and there’s no clear answer at least from my vantage point. Maybe if plug it into Claude it will give us a more coherent answer.

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

#374

Post by HDThoreaun »

czgov wrote: post #39
HDThoreaun wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This country's lack of death panels is one of the biggest contributors to our heinously overpriced healthcare system. Insurers stopping doctors from prescribing shit that doesnt work is literally the only thing keeping costs down in the entire system.

Ah yes. Those health insurance companies are doing God’s working protecting us all. They have no part in why our system is heinously overpriced as you put it.

Of course there are plenty of complaints to be made about insurers. The death panels aren’t one of them though. Mangione had a horrible, incurable back issue, and wanted an expensive experimental treatment that wouldn’t work. It was good that he was told no, if only to stop him from getting his hopes up. The rest of us not getting scammed is nice too.

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

#375

Post by ignoramous »

mcv wrote: post #356
account42 wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forc…

> 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.

All valid, but as always, there's nuances in how people think about assimilation and other things: Normative-ness shouldn't be mistaken for intentional racism. As for normative-ness being systemic racism, there's good deal of changes to be sought there as well, but social institutions that rely on social norms often resist dramatic changes without dramatic escalation in social struggle. The thing with escalation is, it brings about social unrest, which most would prefer to not deal with at all, especially those (who believe in) climbing up the social ladder, or are (relatively) less harmed by the status quo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normativity

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

#376

Post by mcv »

ignoramous wrote: post #375
mcv wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 forc…

> 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. All valid, but as always, there's nuances in how people think about assimilation and other things: Normative-ness shouldn't be mistaken for intentional racism. As for normative-ness being systemic racism, there's good deal o…

Valid point. Of course society needs norms. And I suspect every healthy society has norms. The big difference is what you do when those norms turn out to be unreasonably restrictive to some people. Do your norms override individual freedom even to the freedom to exist and be yourself?

There has to be a point where norms have to give way to freedom, but where do you draw that line?

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

#377

Post by maximinus_thrax »

silver_sun wrote: post #242
maximinus_thrax wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and then rotated his MAC address to dodge the bans that the admin was trying to place on him And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is.

The difference here is that the scientific papers he downloaded weren't freely available to the public, like those scraped webpages would be. Corporate scrapers have been sued[0] in the past for scraping pages from behind a login page / paywall. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

Neither are the pirated books Meta is using for model training.

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

#378

Post by Dylan16807 »

necovek wrote: post #351
Dylan16807 wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

2 billion dollars per 200 deaths, not per death. So that immediately drops your rough calculation to $500 per ticket, not too far off from actual ticket values.

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

#379

Post by pdonis »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #277
pdonis wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists. No, you did that, by responding to my post where I said "should" as though I were trying to describe how things are instead of how they ought to be. > I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. I didn't say that. You need to work on your r…

> No, you did that, by responding to my post where I said "should" as though I were trying to describe how things are instead of how they ought to be. I dont really want to get into a tit for tat, but for clarification, you said several times that the public had paid for the papers. Researchers were not paid to create open access papers. You even said it was criminal that they weren't. > didn't say that. You need to…

> You said several times that the public had paid for the papers. Researchers were not paid to create open access papers. You even said it was criminal that they weren't.

I had assumed that readers would be able to exercise intelligence and common sense to see that I was describing how things should be, not how they are. Evidently I assumed too much in your case.

> rude...

It is to laugh: you had no problem describing me as "antisocial" and "delusional", and now you're complaining that I am being rude?

I think I'm done here.

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

#380

Post by loeg »

mcv wrote: post #325
loeg wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you think copyright is in service of? It doesn’t exist for its own sake.

The justification is that it's supposed to protect the individual creative from more powerful publishers just taking and copying their stuff. In practice, it seems to mostly protect the interests of the most powerful party.

No, it has nothing to do with relative power. It is about economic incentives to encourage creation -- the "business models" you deride in your earlier comment.

> The primary purpose behind copyright law is to foster the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public. By granting authors the exclusive right to authorize certain uses of their works, copyright provides economic incentives to create new works and to make them available in the marketplace.

https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/copyright-policy/copyright-b...

Post reply on HN