241–250 of 300 posts
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Does some other body write laws? It's 100% justified to criticize congress if you actually want to change things; a prosecutor can only prosecute for violations of the law.
You're missing the "hey, I was just doing my job," part.
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It makes a big difference. Four million is apparently the majority of JSTOR's database. Keep in mind that JSTOR doesn't own those articles, it just arranges approved access to paying institutions on behalf of the various journals which do own the articles. If Aaron had distributed them he might have damaged around a thousand different institutions involved in an important segment of the knowledge and innovation indus…
Or his actions could have spread the wealth of information to many who lack access to it, facilitating further progress. The notion that publicly funded research works are behind paywalls is absurd. In any case, we will never know, because he never got around to actually distributing or doing anything with the downloaded products of public funding.
Not to mention, let's say we're talking about stuff funded by the U.S. taxpayers... are you sure they would want those scientific articles to be freely available outside the U.S.? Similar questions apply to things funded by the U.K., France, etc.
Who gets to make that choice? In Aaron's world, he anointed himself Caesar and said that he gets to do so...
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Ortiz today: and they recognized that his conduct – while a violation of the law – did not warrant the severe punishments authorized by Congress and called for by the Sentencing Guidelines in appropriate cases. Ortiz on 9/2012, adding 9 counts to the conduct that we learn "did not warrant...severe punishment": http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/09/aaron-swartz-felony... Federal prosectors added nine new felony cou…
"And here is Ortiz in her own press release telling the entire world the DOJ is threatening Swartz with a maximum penalty of 35 years and $1M in fines: http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.... . AARON SWARTZ, 24, was charged in an indictment with wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. If convicted on…
Wrong. It's up to the prosecutor which charges are filed, which are dropped, which are pursued in court.
If they are taking those charges to trial, and they were in this case, it means they are seeking those penalties. Now, they may ask the judge for a lesser sentence ... everyone wants to appear merciful after you beat the guy down, but they most certainly were seeking them to begin with.
Also, this entire "judge decides" is absolute bullshit. And it smells like bullshit to anyone who has been in a court room.
Technically, even if you accept the plea bargain, after you stand in front of the judge and say "guilty" ... the judge can easily ignore your plea deal, accept your guilty plea, and sentence you to the maximum allowed. Now, that almost never happens, since that would undermine the whole system ... but it can, since it's up to the judge.
Judges, frequently, give deference to the prosecutor on sentencing matters, unless they feel the defendant deserves a break. That puts the onus on the prosecutor to act in a just manner, instead of saying "oh, it's up to the judge, don't look at me".
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Almost never does a plea get overturned by a judge.
Just happened in my small town. Mayor got caught falsifying documents in previous city job. Pled guilty, agreed to fine + resignation. Judge threw that out, added 15 days in jail. Mayor didn't resign till the DA filed suit to enforce the law. Much popcorn was consumed watching theatrics in town of 1k people.
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It is actually, because unlikely though the name may seem to you the Nuremberg defense is actually a lot older than WorldWar II and was historically invoked for lots of other things besides war crimes. The fact that during the Nuremberg trials it was used so frequently that it got named because of them does not detract from this. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders
Sure. But what Ortiz is pulling here is not a Nuremberg Defense ("I was aware of the injustice, but my hands were tied"). She clearly states that she's completely fine with "severe punishment" in "appropriate cases", just that with regards to Aaron, it seemed somewhat inappropriate to her and her office. (I agree that her role, and the role of her office, in Aaron's prosecution suggests the exact opposite, but that's…
It isn't, though. That she comes out with this attitude afterwards is absolutely self-serving and cannot be relied on as an accurate description of her motivations. The "hey, well, that was just the press release" claptrap should be completely disregarded as a mitigating rationale for the ass-covering bullshit that it is.
This leaves us with the "hey, Congress passed these laws, don't look at me," attitude that, as Jacques astutely points out, removes her agency from her actions.
The concept and practice of prosecutorial discretion, however, casts the lie to that position. Barthes and Derrida's "death of the author" is not a force in the law, so Ortiz attempting to play The Cog role should be seen as nothing more than sarcasm.
> and did so reasonably. They still believe that? Sorry but they're unfit for the job. They need to go. There was nothing reasonable about their actions on this case. > a sentence that we would recommend to the judge of six months in a low security setting. Six months in jail for downloading files that were accessible to him? All he did was violate terms of service! Are we going to start arresting under-age Facebook…
These two links will clear up a lot of misconceptions you seem to have about this case. http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/ http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
Do they? The first analyses the law given a stated set of assumptions about the facts. If Swartz was able to successfully dispute some of those alleged facts (many of which came from the indictment), it could completely change the outcome. And the second basically punts on the specific issue of whether the plea offered was appropriate or not, describing the legal standard but declining to apply it to the case.
Both posts are excellent if you want to get a feel for the law surrounding this case from someone who legitimately knows what he's talking about, but whether what the prosecutors did was appropriate depends substantially on the actual facts, which Kerr has no better access to than the rest of us.
To hear Aaron's defense counsel tell it, the facts show that he was completely innocent. And if you accept that version of the facts rather than the one in the indictment, it seems especially difficult to conclude that what prosecutors did was appropriate.
I can't imagine how hard finding an apartment in SF (already hard) becomes if you have to disclose that you're a convicted felon with time spent.
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> especially in a relatively fragile and cash-strapped field like academia. Academia does not publish articles. Publishers do and they are anything but cash strapped, check out Elsevier for instance.
Ah yes, the flipside of the normal rule of law, where it only gets directed at the poor. Now you're saying it's OK to mug someone, as long as they're rich and wouldn't have really needed the money anyways.
(1) this is an organization, not a person
(2) they're not being 'mugged' (see below), it's us that are being mugged every time we want to read about some piece of research
(3) whether or not they 'need money' isn't a factor
(4) use of the word 'mugging' implies violence, which was not applicable here
The law has long recognized that there is such a thing as 'the public good' as well as 'the public domain'. That didn't stop Disney from getting rich over stories already in the public domain and it won't stop publishers from making money on content.
There is no innate right to wall off a chunk of human heritage and claim ownership, even though lobbying power and money have distorted the balance of power substantially.