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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

#161

Post by s1artibartfast »

pdonis wrote: post #153
hk1337 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available.

The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been.

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.

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

#162

Post by Melatonic »

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…

Can you give any more details ? I've never heard about this but sad if true

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

#163

Post by pdonis »

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 don't like talking about this

I can see why it's difficult, but I think your post provides some much-needed context.

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

#164

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mcv wrote: post #76
ignoramous wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt: Every industrial & commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps ... The ordinary English wor…

The exact same mechanism is used to keep poor white Americans voting Republican: even if they're poor, they see themselves as the white ruling class over black and Hispanic people, despite the fact that they themselves are kept poor by the real ruling class.

You're missing the symmetry. The two party system is a false dichotomy. The enemy is not the other party, it's the system that causes there to be only two alternatives that are both captured by mostly the same interests. Each party convinces half the population that the other is trying to destroy them so that their votes cancel out.

And then Marx calls this a criticism of "capitalism" even though it's fundamentally a generic criticism of what happens when you centralize political power and then allow special interests to divide people into camps.

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

#165

Post by pdonis »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #161
pdonis wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been.

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.

> Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.

So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding.

Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't explicit language to that effect in the grants, see further comments below.

> 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.

Invalid comparison. The scientific papers in question are not the personal property of the scientists.

> Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding.

IMO this should be the case, and it's an outrage that it's not, since it should be an obvious requirement for any research that our tax dollars pay for.

> That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.

Maybe that wasn't written into the grants explicitly, but that just means our government is (once again) failing to act in our best interests.

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

#166

Post by AnthonyMouse »

salawat wrote: post #143
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're going to say things like that you have to give examples.

You just created a large, TBTF corp's veto. Pass a law or have a law passed a corp TBTF doesn't want? Break it and force the Government's hand to strike it down.

Isn't that the other way around? The law already can't be enforced against the TBTF corporation, so what do they care if it stays on the books? But now you can't enforce it against someone else or they can point to you not enforcing it against them.

Except that's the point. The government would now have to do that or they lose the law. If it's a good law then they don't want to lose it, but if it's a good law then they should be enforcing it against them.

And, of course, the correct way to deal with this is to break the TBTF corporations into many smaller pieces so that stops being a problem.

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

#167

Post by pdonis »

9x39 wrote: post #151
pdonis wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> He did something illegal Read the book Three Felonies A Day. The law is so bloated now that we all do illegal things all the time, we can't help it. What Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers that should be in the public domain to begin with, because we paid for the research already with our tax money. The fact that such information is considered "proprietary" and JSTOR and other companies…

> Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers That's the root, but I think what Swartz actually did was anger someone at MIT, who called the Secret Service. The federal involvement persisted even after JSTOR and the state quit, and they had him served on a plate with MIT's help. You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned phone call, as it turns out.

> I think what Swartz actually did was anger someone at MIT, who called the Secret Service.

MIT was concerned that someone (they didn't know who it was at the time--in fact IIRC they didn't find out until the police told them after they caught Swartz) was using their network in a suspicious way. I don't know that anyone was "angered".

> You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned phone call, as it turns out.

I don't think the people at MIT who called in the police (and they were, IIRC, fairly low level people) had any idea what a shitstorm they were going to unleash. Nor do I think the (higher-level, but still IIRC not at the level of the top MIT administration) people at MIT who ended up interacting with the Federal prosecutor thought through what was actually going on as they should have, or had the issue considered by the MIT administration as a whole as it should have been.

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

#168

Post by 9x39 »

qingcharles wrote: post #159
nextaccountic wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what's the maximum penalty for trespassing? The prosecution was looking for a disproportionate sentence About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas

If it was charged as trespassing, not something higher like burglary, then the level of his trespass was probably the lowest misdemeanor. Usually trespass is a sliding scale starting with a warning not to return. Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the la…

Don't think they did trespassing:

wire fraud

computer fraud

unlawfully obtaining info from a protected computer

recklessly damaging a protected computer

aiding and abetting

criminal forfeiture

https://web.archive.org/web/20130608041804/https://www.wired...

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

#169

Post by AnthonyMouse »

giantg2 wrote: post #134
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…

"If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged" It's unlikely people would have enough evidence of high enough quality to make that case. The prosecution will just say the evidence isn't enough.

The prosecution can say whatever they want, but the worst of the existing laws are the one that are pretty easy to prove, and it's the court rather than the prosecution who makes the decision.

You'll also get some nice incentives where the government will be arguing that a particular behavior is not a violation of the law so they don't have to charge someone they don't want to, which in turn leaves you with that precedent if the judge agrees with them and then they want to charge someone else for doing that later.

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