201–210 of 300 posts
Statement Deconstruction STATEMENT OF UNITED STATES ATTORNEY CARMEN M. ORTIZ REGARDING THE DEATH OF AARON SWARTZ As a parent and a sister, I can only imagine the pain felt by the family and friends of Aaron Swartz, and I want to extend my heartfelt sympathy to everyone who knew and loved this young man. [Sympathy - a good start but no apology.] I know that there is little I can say to abate the anger felt by those wh…
> I must, however, make clear that this office’s conduct was appropriate in bringing and handling this case. That's why you assign investigations to independent entities, and that's why butchers aren't allowed to do their own health inspection. Whether it was appropriate or not is not for Carmen Ortiz to say. "The prosecutors recognized that there was no evidence against Mr. Swartz indicating that he committed his ac…
"Is a falsifiable claim. I'm looking forward to Aaron's lawyers' response to this statement." I'm curious. How is it you've determined that Ortiz is lying on multiple accounts, but that Aaron's lawyer must be dispelling gospel truth?
Where did it say that?
If Aaron's lawyers statement disagrees with Ortiz' then there will hopefully be some factfinding to determine who tells the truth and who does not. If they both agree then the falsifiable claim turned out to be true.
Falsifiable does not mean 'false'.
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So might makes right?
No. You cannot overcome Might by convincing it to be Right. Not reliably. You overcome Might with Might. If you are Right, that actually increases your strength. But you still have to win. You still have to fight. That means strategy and preparation and readiness for loss. Anyone thinking anything else isn't thinking, they're dreaming. They're going lose, and the higher the stakes the more they'll get hurt.
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Six months in a minimum security jail seems perfectly reasonable to me for repeatedly breaking the law and in no way some sort of "overreach" or "witch hunt". Her job was to find a settlement acceptable to both parties.
Had they gone to trial, however, he was likely facing 7 years, according to another article on the front page: http://www.volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-agains...
In Swartz's case the sad thing is he probably never expected this outpouring of support. To him it probably seemed as if the world either didn't care or didn't support him. Just read the old HN post he made for legal fund donations. It's unfortunate he can't realize how most people are on his side.
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Except defending himself would have cost on the order of a million dollars (Per Lessig) - does he go to his family for that? Even if he turns out to be found completely innocent, him, his family, and those who he can turn to would have been wiped out financially. That part of the story doesn't get enough attention.
If he accepted the plea bargain of six months, then the case wouldn't have gone to trial, avoiding the excessive legal fees. I don't understand the timeline, but had he accepted the plea bargain, is it not possible that he would have already served his sentence by now?
From all the information that I've seen so far it looks as if the legal fees were plenty excessive already.
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Aaron was founder of Demand Progress, organization that actually fought laws like PIPA/SOPA, and many other things, and the laws didn't pass. This is a list of campaigns by Demand Progress: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress#Campaigns
If you think US Attys prosecute people because they organize peacefully against copyright laws, you're living in a different world from the real one.
> 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…
http://www.justice.gov/usao/ma/news/2011/July/SwartzAaronPR.... Downloading four million files, apparently. And if by breaking terms and services you mean illegally distributing protected content and threatening the business model of JSTOR then yes, I suppose that is true.
I keep on hearing this, and it continues to make no sense to me, so forgive me for reposting one of previous posts (s/commercial value/business model/ if it helps):
It seems implausible to me that publishing the contents of JSTOR in such a way would actually destroy any substantial amount of JSTOR's value. What university would actually drop their JSTOR subscription in favour of a bunch of unlicensed PDFs they torrented? JSTOR, in addition to keeping you on the right side of copyright law, gives you all their systems for querying their data, and keeps itself up to date. Maybe a university in a developing country would drop their subscription, but any in the US? I find it unlikely. Such a torrent would be far more useful to an individual who didn't have access to an organization that subscribed. However it seems these pay-per-download fees only account for a fraction of a percent of JSTOR's operating budget (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5064408). So it looks like there is some feasible harm there, but by no means destroyed commercial value.
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Ortiz is an Obama Administration appointee who wants to run for the Massachusetts governorship. She's making this argument to try to salvage her political career...it isn't a courtroom argument and it will be easy for her to trip up, she doesn't understand the dynamics of this firestorm.
As a foreigner (French) I'm surprised that Americans apparently don't get that mixing a career in politic with a career in justice is the open door to abuse, demagogy or conflicts of interests. This should not be allowed or even possible.
However, people moving between legislative and executive branches of the government is pretty common. State legislators become governors, governors become federal legislators, federal legislators run for president.
In the US, prosecutors are part of the executive branch. That's because their job is to represent the state. They are supposed to seek justice, but in the context of an adversarial system. Judges are nominally neutral umpires; prosecutors battle with defense attorneys. Both sorts of attorneys are expected to fight vigorously but fairly for their side. So the burden of fairness mainly falls on the system and the judges, not the partisans on either side.
But yes, that does produce a conflict of interest when deciding what crimes to prosecute. They have an incentive to pick cases that benefit both the state and themselves.
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One, two, a million, four million, what difference does it actually make? The crime was violating the terms, it isn't relevant where the EOF bit was transmitted. If you made the same files half as big he would have "stolen" twice as many files, or twice as big then he would have done half the crime by your logic. He never distributed anything. No clue where you got that from? Additionally "threatening a business mode…
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…
I believe there is no circumstance under which a release of the articles would have threatened JSTOR's business model in any significant way. And I think JSTOR believes that as well, which is why they told the feds not to pursue this.