The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him.
There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).
Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
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 means justice for ALL; we might be able to prevent the next Aaron Swartz.
Edit: As someone that has done both state and fed time, the thing that makes me the saddest here is that the charges would have been drastically reduced if not dismissed and his appeals would have had a high probability of success. They use this "scare tatic" so much and I understand why it works; the possibility of facing those years is terrifying. I don't mean that in any demeaning manner, 25/26 and never having done time I cannot imagine how terrified he must have been.
Edit: I would also like to bring attention to the fact that M. Zuckerberg aggressively pursues these types of cases against people for doing far less than he has done.
> 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 enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws.
A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore.
Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.
>> A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is repealed and no one can be charged with it anymore.
This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.
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.
TBTF is not a thing. It's all in your mind. Evergrande and Country Garden would've been classified TBTF in the minds of many USians, yet they failed.
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
> 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.
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
If you see such a comment, you can vouch for it (small menu point next to flag) and revive it. I did that now because I agree with your assessment - of late I do this very often because even comments which quote articles/laws etc. verbatim and with a link are flagged/voted to death.
Ideally what would happen is the corporation starts having enforcement action against it and then its leadership is forced out to rescue said corporation from failing.
This certainly seems better than just making TBTF (which I assume means too big to fail) entities be above the law.
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.
Congress (and state legislatures) pass laws, but don’t necessarily authorize the resources to prosecute all offenders, so prosecutors are given some latitude who to target.
IANAL, but my understanding is this: Malicious prosecution is a defense. Selective enforcement is not. The difference is for judges and juries to decide.
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.
That's pretty reductive. Or do you not see a difference for example between someone speeding to get to the hospital vs speeding to elude police after a bank robbery?
In fact most people are okay with selectively stretching time limits and elevating a low class misdemeanor into a felony in order to prosecute someone where the party who would be the injured party said there was no injury.
And lest people think this is a one way street, each side thinks the other deserves interpreting the law to “get the real baddies.”
Our system has that built in. You can only be punished as to the norm and standards, findings can create precedent for other cases, etc. The workaround is they just use an 'as applied standard' so that it only can 'apply' to the one case due to that case's unique 'circumstances'. They do it all the time to prevent precedents from being set. 'As applied' rules are excluded from setting precedent.
As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to prevent establishing legal norms from judicial findings the way our system is supposed to.
> If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down
I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.
Going after every possible case would be staggeringly expensive for marginal gain, the cost society would massively exceed the benefits. Yes the system as it is that relies on discretion, but there’s always discretion involved, and we rely on separation of powers, public pressure, etc to act to try and correct excesses. Of course that is not guaranteed to work, and won’t work perfectly, but no system will. Societies are dynamic systems.
Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed.
Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.
Again, this is a wealth tax. Rich get driven around and don't loose their jobs for loosing their license. Try being poor though and having this happen.
That's a straw man though. The argument isn't that poor people should get to break traffic laws but that those who can afford to loose their license shouldn't get to break them either.
Quick question, without looking it up, can you list the number of laws you can break which will result in your license revocation?
The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.
Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer.
Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm.
It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed.
It's a common complaint but the complaint is ridiculous because the penalties already scale with the scope of the activity. It's typical when you sue a corporation for the penalty for willful violations to be treble damages, i.e. three times the actual damages. If you rip customers off by $10,000 then you pay $30,000. If you're huge and rip customers off by $10 billion then you pay $30 billion.
Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels.
The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement.
And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.
Penalties are not just to compensate for the harm done but also to incentivize against doing the harm in the first place. This only works if penalties * p(getting convicted) > profit. p(getting convicted) very much depends no the size of the entity so penalties need to be increased accordingly to attain the same deterrent effect.
Being able to game a naive implementation of such scaling is not an argument for not scaling penalties but for designing the concrete implementation to be hard to game and/or applying even higher penalties when someone has been found to try to game the system - which is something that should be done more in general.
We can absolutely make it so that people hiring private chauffeurs share in the liability for breaking traffic laws just like we can absolutely hold CEOs liable for illegal activities done by employees under their purview.
Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).
The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.
It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
> This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes.
"Have someone who pays the lower amount do the thing" is precisely arbitrage.
> That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).
Their income for the last three years was $10k, $10k and $1M. Their 20 year average is $80k but the three year average is $340k. So now you're increasing their exposure even more -- before they get a hugely disproportionate fine if it happens to be in the one year they made $1M. Now they still get a disproportionate fine but are exposed to it for three times as long.
> The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.
Michael Dell hails a cab and then the driver gets a speeding ticket. No evidence driver had any idea of his passenger's net worth; no evidence the passenger ever requested exceeding the speed limit and couldn't see the speedometer from the back seat. Is this a billion dollar fine? Who pays it, the person who has nothing like a billion dollars or the person who did nothing wrong?
It's clearly unreasonable to impose the fine in that case, but it's also easy to use it for arbitrage if you don't.
> It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
Maybe we should have a preference for rules that are effective rather than performative.
"John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
"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.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" quote is from Ronald Wright. The Steinbeck quote is actually very different than the Ronald Wright quote.
The actual quote is mocking wealthy armchair leftists rather than explaining why the American working class rejected socialism:
>>Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: “After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?” Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picnickers on her property. ...
Even flat-out rejecting the desire to charge them more wouldn't be bending over backwards for them. It would simply be charging them based on harm done rather than what affects them.
And the post you're responding to is making a much less extreme position, that it's hard to scale the fine properly.
With laws, you generally want to charge and cover for the harm done, but also to disincentivise law breaking.
For instance, someone might be significantly speeding for 10 years, and never hurting anyone or causing any harm (financial or otherwise). Should they pay nothing?
Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?
But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
> Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?
Yes, that one. Increasing everyone's risk is harm, sorry if I wasn't clear about that part.
> But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
The line of thought here is: Does it matter? If the average speeder pays $2 of fines per $1 of harm, it's a net positive. Yes that does let rich people buy priority. But rich people can usually buy priority. At least they're not getting a helicopter involved.
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 an easy to look up expert answer, and you don't worry about the details of each case.
> how can you even be sure how much has speeding and not something else mainly contributed to the harm
We have some useful numbers on the impact of speeding, and for something like this assume the worst plausible impact.
Edit: If there's around 1 death per hundred million vehicle miles and it's worth ten million dollars, that's ten cents of death per mile. If a quarter of deaths have speeding as a factor and we exaggerate that to 100% blame, that's 2.5 cents per mile divided by how rare speeding is. If we guess 15% of people are speeding at any moment, that's 17 cents of damage per mile. To pay double they'd need a $200 ticket every 600 miles of speeding.
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.
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.
So then you outlaw that, too. It is an idea with merit to be refined not rejected outright because you found the one flaw. Under the current system, the wealthy can speed themsleves and pay small fines.
The violation of the law as practiced is that a Little Person did this and threatened a Player's profits. A Player can do what they like to another and form some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement afterward... but Schwartz did not have enough commas in his bank account to be allowed to dabble, not a single investor behind him. Nor was his goal the overriding morally correct goal of maximizing social stratification through profit seeking. Knocking down paywalls is dead weight loss, not market predation. He had to go. He had to be made an example of. For the system, this was personal.
It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body.
A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.
Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but
The 1860s?
Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?
This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.
>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't
Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...
But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
The root problem here is that I have no voice and have no real friends to join forces with. I literally have zero power to change the system. Wealth inequality puts my interests at odds with those who benefit from the current system.
At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust.
You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day.
I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion. Not friend material.
Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals (and low-trust environment) as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for 'ex-colleagues/friends' twice in my career; first time was a guy who didn't have a job who was in open source and I had known online and spoke regularly for 2 years; they literally lied to my boss and backstabbed me and didn't even join the company... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and although he didn't slander me to my boss with salacious lies, his cold feet made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.
The point here is that as you stated: "you still do not understand". For those of us that have been under the thumb of the judicial system it can feel like the world is on you. We have no idea of his mental state, we have no idea of the nuance or motivation but what I do think we know is that the actions of the state here far exceeded any interpretation of what would be deemed an appropriate punishment for the said "crime" committed. What we do understand is that if he hand not been attacked by an over-zealous prosecutor there is a far greater probability he would have been able to handle the situation in a logical manner and maybe even still be here today to defend himself.
We are not asserting that any specific outcome is empirically superior to another just that given the facts of the case, it was not adjudicated fairy given what we know of similar cases.
Yes. 100%, the idea that we are all equal under the law is a joke.
And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.
So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.
You are a coward; which is why you cannot use your name or identity and only feel comfortable insulting people online because it makes you feel like a big bad keyboard warrior.
I feel bad for you because not only is your argument irrational and baseless its not even entertaining. I am not one of the "thugs" that harassed him. I never met him; but I was a huge fan. I am also not employed by anyone that would participate in such things. If you had even a modicum of intelligence you would just look at my other post and easily infer as such.
I suggest you drink some water, check-in with a loved one and get some rest.
Commiserations on the abuse from that sockpuppet. Please don't let it dent your enthusiasm for the community: you are welcome, and i wish you long life and health.
So, pay for access, or go to your local library, or browse the internet, or get free access in a similar way that Aaron Swartz did? Knowledge often requires funding to be created in the first place.
I mean, they don’t, exclusively, or no-one would be giving money to JSTOR. And certainly, no-one would be scanning millions of old journal articles for free.
I don't know where people get the idea that JSTOR is one of the bad guys. It's a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access. It costs money to do that. What specifically have they done that you disapprove of?
Beats me what you're talking about, then. The literal answer to your original question is that people use SciHub and Library Genesis because they're free. But they're free because they infringe copyright. Maybe Swartz was opposed to copyright per se or maybe he was trying to make a point about free availability of journal articles associated with publicly funded research. Either way, JSTOR is the wrong target. JSTOR doesn't hold the copyright on those articles. JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access – which is exactly what Swartz seemed to be in favor of.
JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives. That's useful to anyone who wants to read an old journal article without going to a physical library. I used to have to go to the library, dig out the relevant issue of Linguistic Inquiry, and photocopy it. Then in 2015, JSTOR started providing access to the entire scanned Linguistic Inquiry archive, so I could access all of those issues digitally.
I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.
SciHub mainly redistributes scans of print archives made by JSTOR and other organisations. And it does not have everything that JSTOR has. For example, this paper is not, as far as I can tell, available on SciHub:
Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place:
Practically speaking, no-one is going to scan centuries' worth of historical journal articles for free. And JSTOR isn’t really an entity outside the research community; it’s a non-profit that grew from within it.
I think we’re talking past each other mostly because I start to lose value on most research for my topics of interest that are more than two or three decades old, let alone five or six.
Hi @dang, the reason I've flagged this account is not this comment itself, but the extremely suspicious account with the same creation date that posted vile abuse to arionhardison.
How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs?
Example 1: antibiotic and antiviral production technology for developing countries. Even if we limit ourselves to out-of-patent molecules, the primary literature describing the discovery, production, modification and testing of life-saving antibiotics was, at the time of Aaron Swartz, largely hidden behind strict paywalls that typically were accessed through a university library subscription. Access to all that information allows countries and institutions with very limited resources to set up generic medical production pipelines for life-saving medications they couldn’t afford to import - or to become international market competitors to established interests.
Again, that’s just restricting the argument to out-of-patent products that can be generically manufactured with no legal issues. What about life-saving but patented products that are too expensive for poor countries and regions to buy on the open market? Does that added-value IP charge justify unnecessary deaths in such cases?
And about that IP - the vast majority of paywalled research literature was produced with taxpayer funds delivered via government funding agencies, and there’s a very good legal argument that this alone puts it into the public domain. If private companies want to set up Bell Labs 2.0 with no government funding and patent everything they discover, that’s their own capex risk, but just hovering around and scooping up publicly funded discoveries via exclusive licensing deals with universities and researchers makes no sense - instead, patents should be available to any citizen of the government that put up the funds, and research papers should be available to anyone.
As far as the argument that widespread distribution of the knowledge to produce antibiotic, antiviral, and other complex biomolecular products represents a biological weapons risk? Notably that’s why no LLM provider service will help develop technical protocols for antibiotics production, or insulin, or anything similar - claimed dual-use risk fears. This conveniently slows the rise of legitimate independent competition in the pharmaceutical sector, which helps if the goal is maximizing profit margins via monopoly power. Bioweapons production realistically requires nation-state or large-corporation scale resources, and the solution is not obfuscation of basic knowledge but rather international treaties, select agent rules, laboratory operation and equipment purchase licensing requirements, etc.
That’s just one sector - there are at least a dozen other examples besides biomolecular drugs of ‘how it would help the world’ to make all published research literature available to anyone with a network connection, ask any LLM to enumerate them.
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.
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.
Whoever can create an objective way to determine the quality of legal representation is onto a real winner.
I find it near impossible, even as someone with a lot of legal knowledge, to tell whether a lawyer I hire is going to advocate zealously and correctly and comprehensively on my part once I hand over my retainer. They all talk a great game.
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.
And that's another advantage corporations have over individuals. If you break the law at scale you can afford to retain lawyers and evaluate them based on past performance.
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 implication wasn't that there'd be "low level" corruption of that nature, but that there's "high level" corruption in both instances; The direction to prosecute Aaron Swartz, and not investigate Meta, are both driven by an interest of the State to protect large enterprises, rather than citizens.
If we consider campaign financing and lobbying, I don't think it's a stretch to believe that almost any outcome can be bought in the US if there's enough money involved.
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.
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 someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
> The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.
That's the racket. Getting any jailtime for "mass downloading" is a severe penalty, but that gets turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
> turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
John Kiriakou talks often about his own lawyers showing up at his house to convince him to take the deal. And then ending up in a higher security prison.
and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case.
If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get it, but that's far from the case.
I think you're being hysterical. Getting threatened for 35 years in jail is absurd for the crime. Stating "oh well it would never have actually _been_ 35 years" is akin to pretending to punch someone and stopping just before you hit them and then mocking them for flinching.
> I wasn't _actually_ going to hit you, quit being a baby.
Which is why its actually illegal to do that to people in a lot of places.
My issue is that the sentence is artificial and used for intimidation as opposed to being a rational basis for a justice system. Hence the mafia analogy.
Imagine if the US had a maximum sentence of 35 years for mere possession of a firearm but in practice, it would only be used in very unlikely conditions. It wouldn't last a minute. It's only allowed to be like this because nobody cares about tech.
> Imagine if the US had a maximum sentence of 35 years for mere possession of a firearm but in practice, it would only be used in very unlikely conditions. It wouldn't last a minute. It's only allowed to be like this because nobody cares about tech.
This is effectively how all federal sentencing and reporting about that sentencing works, all the time. A lawyer blogger Popehat has talked about this for years[1]. Headlines pull add up all charges and the maximum statutory sentences for those and report it as if that's even remotely close to a likely outcome and it's not. In fact, Popehat actually wrote about that as it applied to Swartz in the aftermath of his suicide[2].
If you read about the Swartz prosecution, you saw people decrying the fact
that he was facing 35 years in prison. That's more than rapists and murders
serve, they say. But they are talking about the maximum possible sentences,
not any sentence he was remotely likely to get. Recently in the context of
another case I explained how federal sentencing works, and how it's driven by
an arcane set of rules producing a recommendation that federal judges often
follow — rules that on most occasions produce a result well below the
maximum possible sentence.
Which isn't to say that this sort of aggressive intimidation isn't bullshit. It is. But it's also not some unique "nobody cares about tech" thing.
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 are able to keep it locked behind paywalls is an outrage.
Further, after Swartz returned all the material he had downloaded and agreed not to do it again, both JSTOR and MIT said they were satisfied and no further action was needed (though JSTOR was more emphatic about it than MIT was). Which, combined with the above, should have ended the case then and there.
> 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.
"When it was discovered, a video camera was placed in the room to record Swartz; his computer was left untouched. The recording was stopped once Swartz was identified,"
IME, months-long internal investigations in an org with Secret Service involvement would be unlikely to escape senior management, but I'm just speculating and only have the same info as everyone else. You might be right.
If they were even slightly concerned that the scope went beyond what they were aware of with JSTOR, they would've either immediately contacted police or disconnected the laptop. The timeline in the report outlines that they discovered the laptop at 8am, and were in internal communications with their bosses and MIT's lawyers before someone finally contacted police at 9:45am.
They knew what was going on before they found the laptop. They had been briefed by someone at MIT who was in contact with JSTOR. I suspect that everyone on the networking staff (and possibly most of the university) knew of the JSTOR downloading situation after the second incident in October. JSTOR had blocked MIT for 3 days, and that must have caught people's attention.
Once they found the laptop, they involved police despite knowing to a virtual certainty that the problem with the laptop was that it was scraping JSTOR, again. They didn't know yet that it was Aaron, but they would've known it would turn out to be someone ideologically just like him.
There was nothing suspicious about it. It was simply jeopardizing MIT's contract with JSTOR. The use of a data closet like that was very bad manners.
I think it is the criminal record. Other places in the world, once you've served your time you can often go right back to living. Not that it is easy but it doesn't hang over you.
In the US, once you have a criminal record - any criminal record - there are flow on effects that keep fucking with you for life.
> 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 worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life ... regards himself as a member of the ruling nation & consequently becomes a tool of the English [ruling class] against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination [over his own self]. He cherishes religious, social, & national prejudices against the Irish worker ...
The Irishman ... sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive & intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.
... The antagonism between Englishmen & Irishmen ... enables the governments of [the US & England], whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.
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.
The con is largely directed at the religious right, of which, poorer whites make up the largest cohort. That's how they convinced people directly targeted by the bigotry to still vote for them.
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.
The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.
What do you mean "by definition"? They do nothing else. Against transgenders, against gay people, against foreigners, against hippies, against black people; it goes back a long time, and always to recruit the support of poor white people by giving them a sense of superiority over an even more oppressed group. Culture war is their primary weapon to distract from the class war they're also waging.
Continually inventing new categories of "opressed" people and then demanding that others grant them special protections is exactly how you start a culture war.
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.
> 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.
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?
It absolutely is. Youth services is one such thing that people just refuse to get upset about. Not when they attack kids for flimsy reasons. And, conversely, people also utterly refuse to react when kids eventually figure out that their way out is to attack people, other kids, social workers and anyone else in institutions, which is one factor that makes youth services facilities such horrible places to be.
I mean he was arrested initially not for the material downloaded but the fact that he, not an MIT student, was found hiding in a facilities closet with his laptop hooked into the network.
I get that MIT's police were meant to join him in a chorus of "Information wants to be free", but let's not act like it's unreasonable to want someone arrested or prosecuted who was not authorized to be in an equipment closet with their computer wired into a switch.
The point is the prosecution's case was ultra weak. He rejected a 6 month plea deal because they were confident they would win in court. That's not the kind of case you bring to get ahead in your career
"look at me, I'm serving the interests of the incumbent education and medical industries by prosecuting the shit out of someone who dared give them the bird, now donate to my campaign".
In many cases it's "all about the money" (and the lawyers). Take the case of Billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors who was famously pursued by federal prosecutors as their ultimate "white whale" in a massive insider trading probe. Though his firm pleaded guilty and paid a record $1.8 billion fine, Cohen himself was never criminally charged or convicted. Yet two lower underlings were convicted and served time (the 2 fall guys).
An "Army of lawyers", no less than 6 top lawyers appeared in the courtroom that day representing Cohen (he did not appear), as a "shot across the bow" message to the US Government that Cohen was prepared to spend a vast sum of his wealth to defend himself and make it a huge undertaking for the government if they wished to proceed.
Lawyers present for Cohen:
Peter Nussbaum: SAC Capital's General Counsel, who entered the plea.
Martin Klotz: Partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Cohen's personal attorney.
Michael Schachter, Daniel Kramer, and Michael Gertzman: Senior litigation partners assisting the defense.
Because the defense consisted of prominent partners from multiple top-tier firms simultaneously, analysts famously calculated that the collective group was costing SAC Capital roughly $10,000 an hour (mere pocket change for a successful hedge fund guy).
Owner of the New York Mets now, by the way, which maybe non-sports following readers will be happy to hear remain a boondoggle. He tried very hard to spend his way to glory, leading the league in payroll at the beginning of the 2025 season, only to crash and burn and end up in last place this season.
Yes, it's also solvable; the crux of the issue is that these people have made it problematic to even discuss any solutions that do not serve their personal, financial and nationalist interest.
All and any fact should be up for discussion. For example, the black community; my community has a serious problem with violence that has caused increased police presence as it spilled out and impacted other communities. We can discuss the why but the fact exist and its up for discussion.
All discussion of the conditions which allow situations like this to occur are shut down and labeled an ism, ist etc...
This is the (John Perkin's coined term) "Corporatocracy" at work.
If you want to know how and why it is like this, read Perkin's books (atm I'm reading "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). It's why Meta will not get sued but Aaron was, and it is why ships are now lining up in front of the Panama canal paying as much as 400k for a crossing with little of that wealth making it to the people of Panama.
Meta's bots are spectatularly awful, and if your organisation needs to use facebook advertising, they're also unblockable. There are ways around it that doesn't exactly block them but does clearly communicate they should GTFO, but it just shows you what an awful company Meta is.
Who was it ? The ^US government^ .. or for that matter, any government or corporation doesn't pursue litigation. It is humans who make this decision (at least for now ...).
Who in the government bureaucracy made the decision and followed through? It's sad that we've become accustomed to accept governments/corporations as entities by themselves when they clearly aren't.
While this sounds good in theory, I suspect the actual result would be much worse for justice in most cases. With the corporation acting as its own legal entity, if you are wronged, you sue and obtain justice from the corporation. If instead you needed to sue each and every shareholder to obtain their share of the liabilities, you'd likely spend many more years in court as each individual owner argues why they aren't personally liable for the given act because they didn't have knowledge, or control over the specific chain of events that caused you harm, and the courts have to sort out each individual case.
I think you missed the point: you can still take damages from the corporation, but if corporation cannot provide them (bankrupcy), owners are held liable for them instead. This is how non-LLC companies are treated.
The instrument of Limited Liability exists to encourage business formation and risk taking for small businesses to kick off.
The way large corporations and rich individuals would structure their projects into a number of corporation-owned LLCs is an obvious gap being addressed in law systems throughout the world.
That would make everyone who has a 401K, IRA, mutual fund, ETF or stocks liable for every action made by the companies invested in. That would be insane.
I am not making a judgement call, merely describing what the GP meant.
I do believe it is not as clear cut though — taking it to an extreme, imagine you directly invested in Epstein's sexual abuse business but only as minority owner. Should you be held liable or not? Now let's extend that to a pyramid scheme lending business. Or a company using child labour? When can we claim immunity and when not?
the government is made up of the people. the people are mostly greedy because our culture worships wealth. broken people, broken culture, broken government.
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
>Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
This has always been the case. It's why lots of us who came up in the 80s and 90s embraced the "fuck corporations" and "information wants to be free" zeitgeist of the times.
It's also why the corporate bootlicking on this site is so grating at times. IDK, maybe I'm the only one but it seems like the veneer has worn off and over the last couple years I've realized HN is "special", not because of the reasons its proponents will recite but because it's where you come to post about the interesting technical challenges you solved while designing a system that goes down to the corner store and buys Hitler a pack of his favorite smokes and everyone laps that up.
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 older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw.
I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands.
It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.
"One of the early victories for me was persuading a young boy of 14 or 15 years of age, named Aaron Swartz, to become the technical architect of the Creative Commons. It took a little persuading, but I told him that this is what he had to do." --Lawrence Lessig
Doctorow, Kottke and others didn't seem to think it was odd that a 14 year old was being flown around the country without his parents present. They pre-gamed at a house instead of a bar because Aaron was too young; the host, then nearly twice his age, later dated him. Didn't end well. And then things really didn't end well.
Epstein made his first contribution to MIT that same year (2002). Lessig arranged for Joi Ito to meet Aaron a year later. According to MIT, Joi Ito met Epstein for the first time one month after Aaron died in 2013.
In the most charitable reading of the situation, Aaron was robbed of his childhood.
I strongly dislike this comment because it's the type of thing some anonynmous person can post online with no credibility or accountability and massively mischaracterize a situation to downplay the very awful things that people did to Aaron and instead place more of the blame on him. We saw the same shit happen constantly with Julian Assange.
Most of us are here anonymously, no? Personally, I choose to trust that my fellow HNers are (by and large) real people speaking in good faith. Otherwise, I'm wasting my time reading any comment thread here at all.
His profile says he wrote for Wired, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack. He spent 4,000 words and six Pantone colors talking about SMS for logins, but never found time to write that powerful, 40 year old men were flying a 14 year old around the country without his parents present, so maybe not.
Sickly Jewish kid has his childhood stolen, gets radicalized, hangs himself is a much more painful story to read. More importantly, it demands actual answers. No wonder it never got told. It's not exactly Brighton Beach Memoirs.
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 filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.
A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/.
> rotated his MAC address
Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.
I'm not sure if this is meant as some kind of "gotcha," but the legal system doesn't work that way. He wasn't rotating his MAC address as a default practice. He changed the last byte of his MAC only when he noticed he was banned from the network.
Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did.
Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today.
> JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal.
If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law?
You are greatly underestimating what was going on.
Over the course of months they tried all kinds of blocking methods that would stop most people, but he kept evading them. It is impossible that he did not know his use of the free access was no longer authorized.
Then he put his equipment on their wired network, which he had no permission to do so and had to trespass to do that. It is irrelevant that the door was unlocked and in a hallway the public could get to. It being unmarked just makes it worse, since doors the public is supposed to use generally are marked.
He also repeatedly came back to that room to check his equipment.
He was now grabbing data at such a high rate that JSTOR cut off all MIT JSTOR access for a few days while they tried to figure out what do next.
At that point MIT research is being disrupted. MIT does a lot of government research and what was going on was indistinguishable at that point from a hostile attack, and police were called.
That's an interesting spin that means precisely nothing. I'm not authorized to enter facilities or building maintenance spaces in buildings in my town because I'm a "community member".
The general public was authorized to enter the facilities 24/7. The exterior doors were unlocked and it was considered an "open campus". The access controls you see today have only existed since COVID. Whether he was a student at the time also means "precisely nothing".
Don't waste your time arguing with people like this. They can't admit the nuance of the situation: what Aaron did was blatantly wrong, and what the government did in response was disproportionate. They will only focus on the latter, and make endless irrational justifications for the former.
The expectation is that MIT doesn't go to the police when someone plugs a computer into a switch in an effectively unlocked data closet.
The expectation is that such individual and laptop doing "unauthorized" scraping doesn't trigger a criminal investigation when the host university, and the target business, didn't implement any meaningful access controls or even rate limiting for any other person on campus.
The expectation is that after an investigation of scraping at 11 req/s (450,000 over 11 hours according to the report), a further 8,000 requests (before JSTOR blocked MIT's /8) two weeks later would not have the effect that "Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide." The expectation based on that claim by JSTOR is that JSTOR was incompetent or lying.
The expectation is that when MIT was able and willing to implement access control for JSTOR, and JSTOR declined because they want to develop a notice to MIT visitors who might be negatively affected by ending uncredentialed access, JSTOR would not then create a tempest in a teapot over the violator returning and continuing to download papers at a reduced speed that wasn't even detected for about a month. On Dec 26, when JSTOR again noticed the "abuse", they went to significant effort to route the violator's requests to a special server and serve them garbage instead of the real PDFs, all on short notice... yet they couldn't add the general notice to MIT visitors about the credentials requirement, on a much less urgent timescale; they had told MIT in October that they needed until after Dec 18th to add such a message. The expectation is that JSTOR's claims are self-serving lies.
The expectation is that such a request pattern would not trigger a report, by the MIT libraries director, to the MIT academic council, that a "cyberattack" had been launched from MIT's network.
The expectation is that you don't get arrested for felony B&E for entering a data closet that's effectively unlocked, connecting to a switch, and scraping a paper hosting site that offers free downloads from the entire institutional network.
The expectation is that you don't get charged with larceny for downloading, in any quantity, papers that are freely available to anyone on the MIT campus or probably most other campuses in the U.S.
The expectation is that sending web requests with a url parameter indicating T&C has been agreed to, and without saving cookies, might be a basis for a civil action, but is not "accessing a computer without authorization" under the CFAA.
The entire situation, at most, should've been a minor local crime and a lawsuit by JSTOR against Swartz. Yet the state charges were dropped (feds didn't want to share required discovery material), and JSTOR settled with Swartz before the feds even indicted.
MIT was caught in an awkward position of having the ability to block unauthenticated scraping to protect their contract with and access to JSTOR, but not doing so. So they proceeded to treat someone connecting to a switch in a data closet and doing what any MIT visitor could do, as a criminal offense.
I don't believe anyone at MIT was genuinely concerned that there was some broader criminal conspiracy when the issue was downloading of papers from JSTOR. Certainly not based on some random Chinese IP pinging or scanning Swartz's laptop. When the data closet laptop was discovered in January, MIT could have left a note telling the owner that JSTOR is very upset and it would be better for everyone if the scraping stopped. Why didn't they? They could even, reasonably, have taken the laptop and external drive and noted that the data closet was insecure and please contact network staff to claim it.
Amusing, but a long string of rogue cyber intrusions coupled with Jstor blocking MIT altogether a few times isn’t something to ignore. Hard to imagine just ignoring the risks and potential of that unknown.
MIT and Jstor had a bunch of incident response going on, and it isn’t a leap to consider Jstor would cut them off for good if the situation went unresolved.
Why do you seem so desperate to characterize Aaron as some amoral super-spy hacker? His ethics are well known. He took issue with Jstor's business model of gatekeeping tax-payer-funded research behind another pay wall, stole some articles, got caught, settled with jstor and MIT. Life could have gone on.
The OP's blog post is about how the law isn't applied equally in the United States. Aaron was an individual and an easy target for the overzealous prosecutor. Meta's a faceless corporation, guilty in the court of public opinion, and they don't even get a timely investigation because they have the money to tie up the broken legal system indefinitely.
Aaron was an example - if you're small enough, you will be caught, tried, and punished in whatever way we see fit to prove that the justice system "works". If you're a billionaire, do whatever you want winkwink.
Maybe, but the prosecution that most people would say lead to his decision to end his life was from abuse of the MIT network over months until they had him on video.
The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue.
To me his crime is the equivalent of sneaking into a public library with a photocopier and copying down books without having a library card. It is not and should not be that serious. Is it annoying? Yes. Should he have gotten in a bit of trouble? Sure. But nothing like what he was charged with or dealt with. They hammered down serious law on this guy for what should of at worse been a petty crime.
Thank you. It's absurd that we are comparing breaking into MIT and (physically) breaking into a network with scraping the web and scanning physical books.
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 land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.
Yeah, intent matters. Evading security matters. It's a big point that his actions were intentional and not passive or accidental - not that IP infringement by corporations isn't its own discussion.
Torrents are openly accessible, even if .gov might enable infringement claims by the rights-holder. They're not hacking into networks.
Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult.
The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT.
Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail.
No, but they do drastically change how people should judge his actions vs someone who simply downloaded some documents that were served on an open web server. OP didn't say "it's ok if a corporation does that", he said that Aaron's actions were more serious than people commonly make them out to be.
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.
JSTOR didn't own the copyright to any of the material, so could only serve it under the license agreements it had. Nevertheless they were able to arrange for their license to allow over 10000 schools, libraries, and other institutions to provide free access to walk-in users.
A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
> they were able to arrange for their license to allow over 10000 schools, libraries, and other institutions to provide free access to walk-in users.
Sure, but that still only covers a miniscule fraction of US taxpayers. Plus, you have to walk in to the school, library, or other institution, instead of just being able to use your web browser at home.
> A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
This is a genuine value add, but it could have been paid for by the government directly without then having the material behind a paywall.
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.
>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.
I think a better analogy for this situation is: The public donates food, then the recipient, after being fed, sells access to (infinite cheaply replicable copies of) said food for a profit. The public in this case just wants to have said food.
The public gives them cash for terms of a grant. If those dont include an open access paper, it is unreasonable to demand it after the fact. It certainly doesn't give a right to go take take their papers (or whatever they made).
> 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.
It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists.
It is fine to want for something to be different, but that doesn't change the facts of how they are.
It's fine to advocate future papers be made public. I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. The word for this is expostfacto recontracting, and undermines just about any system of law where is used.
Last, there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Free public access is often the least of those concerns. Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.
To understand this better, consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding. The government might rightly calculate that it is in the public interest too help a for-profit company develop a cancer cure with grants, then have no cure at all.
> 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 reading comprehension.
> The word for this is expostfacto recontracting
No, the word for what you're doing is putting words in my mouth and attacking a straw man.
> there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public.
Can you give some?
> Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.
Which they then have to pay fees to, using more of our tax dollars, because of the sweetheart deals the government has given the journals.
Not only that, but researchers nowadays share copies of papers over the Internet routinely (for example, using sites like arxiv.org), so they don't even need journals to know what other researchers are doing. So even that rationale for paying the journals is now out of date.
> consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding
A patent requires revealing the information that the invention is based on, in exchange for the exclusive right to produce the item for some period of time. So I don't see how this is an argument for keeping publicly funded research behind a paywall.
> 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 work on your reading comprehension.
rude...
> Can you give some?
I gave a few. The government may want the technology in production and dont care at all about any public disclosure. all the researchers they care about will have journal access either way.
One I didn't mention is that researchers want the freedom to publish as they choose. The government is happy to trade this away as part of the grant process.
The point I was trying to illustrate is that there is no reason to think open access is a non-negotiable or top priority from the government (or public good) perspective. All things being equal, it is nice to have.
> 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?
What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?
You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it.
Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
How much money do you think the scientists who wrote the papers are getting from the access fees? (Hint: it’s the only number that stays the same when you multiply it by sometting.)
The scientists who wrote the papers that Swartz downloaded were compensated, with the public's tax dollars. That should mean that we the public should now have free access to what we paid for. Unfortunately the government prefers to let private companies keep those papers behind paywalls.
> 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.
I don't think it matters much for the argument, which is valid (or not) regardless of whether you get the precise facts about the Swartz prosecution right, but Swartz was not facing 35 years. That's the statutory maximum sentence you'd get if you ignored the sentencing guidelines and grouped none of the charges, which is not how anything works. The prosecutors threatening Swartz and his attorneys claimed they'd pursue something like 7 years. But Swartz's own (well regarded, well qualified) attorney, writing after his death, when there was ample reason to take shots at the prosecution, believed that even had Swartz lost the case, he'd be unlikely to receive a custodial sentence.
I bristle as well when essays like this state that he "was effectively assassinated by our legal system"
While I think there are a lot of good arguments that the prosecution was excessive and meant to create a chilling effect, it is a huge leap to say they assassinated him. He was clearly already vulnerable when this happened, or he would have never resorted to taking his own life when there were still so many avenues before him to try to get out of the situation. While this does not make it any less tragic, it does make it a lot less of an 'assassination'.
I don't find it rhetorically useful to use language like that in these situations. It distracts from the real issues at hand.
It's completely illegitimate to say he was "assassinated". Words mean things, and unless the government sent someone who personally killed Aaron, it wasn't an assassination. That doesn't mean what happened to him was right. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about the situation. But one doesn't get to misuse a word where it doesn't apply just to make a rhetorical flourish.
How many days have you spent in jail or prison? I've done two, and it was weird coming out to freedom. Actual thought taking some of my first steps: "wait, if I want to be over there, I can just start walking?" The guards and fellow jailers were all quite reasonable, too.
I can barely imagine facing a whole year. I can't imagine facing five.
If there is a point to be made from what you're talking about, it's about how threats of inhumane prison sentences are used to eliminate our right to trial by jury.
One of the reasons so many people believe Swartz faced 35 years in prison is that any attempt to correct the record is met by responses like this. Ironically, you're doing the work of the prosecutors for them: this is the whole reason they quote these outlandish and implausible sentencing possibilities in their press releases.
By "responses like this" do you mean any form of criticism? What I am calling out is your purely positive statement that lacks any sort of normative judgement. It's the type of thing which helps normalize the status quo, regardless of whether the cudgel is 35 or 7 years.
Also, Aaron was pals with some of the brightest people in tech and law. I have a hard time imagining that they didn't try to ease his stress by pointing out that 35 was just the typical bluster.
I recently came to the conclusion that it was never about copyright. It's about corporate control, about punishing contempt for business model.
Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. All the kids sued by the MAFIAA were punished because they disrespected a business model. Copyright was merely the mechanism to make it stick. But AI companies and Meta can disrespect copyright all they want, because in their case, it serves a corporate business model, and those hurt or disenfranchised by it are regular people or much smaller companies.
The law doesn't exist to protect the weak from the powerful, but to enable the powerful to punish the weak.
This is pretty close. They attacked the business model, which was an attack on the law itself, which was an attack on the civil structure, which was an attack on everyone who benefits from it.
Lots of people have a vested interest in civil structure, from the poor to the rich. Everyone would be worse off if the US looked like Haiti.
That said, people benefit in different amounts from the system at Large, and lose or benefit from Individual policies
It provides a legal justification for censorship. Originally used by The Church to prevent the wrong sort of bible from being printed. It has always been about insulating monopolists and gatekeepers against change.
We desperately need to find better ways to pay creators, and it's good that they've managed to put copyright law to some non-nefarious use towards that end. But they deserve something that actually meets their needs, which copyright law does not.
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.
You confuse words with outcomes. The fact that they say that that's the intent, doesn't mean that it's always the outcome. Copyright offers the most protection if you've got the funds to litigate. The government isn't going to do it for you. And copyright has absolutely been used to stifle the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public.
> Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model.
Exactly. And what's more, it's a business model, keeping behind paywalls scientific papers that we the public have already paid for once with our tax dollars, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
Aaron Swartz's most famous book recommendation, in a now 20 years old blogpost (
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany ), Chomsky's Understanding Power, contains many examples of such cases of those in power, big corporations and the government getting away with crimes. I should probably reread it, even though it can be depressing - but not quite as depressing as Manufacturing Consent.
The best state of affairs is that neither Aaron nor Meta nor anyone else should be targeted for scraping. It shouldn't be a crime. I understand the ire about the injustice, but I don't think the right situation is that because Aaron's case was wrongly pursued, we should somehow enforce that error in the name of consistency.
Swartz was federally charged with wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act based on allegedly unauthorized access, not simply prosecuted for copyright infringement or “downloading articles.” Also, he was offered a plea deal of 6 months and his own attorneys did not expect him to serve any time even if rejecting the plea deal and convicted.
And, I feel like people really gloss over, perhaps because it is uncomfortable to think about...
He took his own life.
There is no doubt the government put him in an uncomfortable position, but his story is a gross and tragic outlier. It's hard to draw any patterned conclusions from it, especially because we'll never know how the case would have worked out had Swartz not exited the judicial process.
He was treated poorly. But somehow a lot of otherwise-smart people think you should not charge a person who suffers from depression or suicidal thoughts.
As someone, who was wrongly accused of a crime, and had to go to court over it. I can relate, I was massively suicidal, made a whole plan and stockpiled what was required to do it. I was having vivid dreams of even more extreme ways I could go about it.
As you can tell that never happened, but at the same time I always argue in comment sections over his case, as people so wildly misrepresent what happened to their own gains. Especially the fact he willingly and continuingly went around blockers put in place to stop the activity from happening, even after being caught.
So since we're all talking about him I just noticed something odd on his old website. If you go to the full archive of his posts (which seems to be sorted by date) and scroll all the way down to the oldest post there is one at the very bottom that is a bit odd with grammar and was posted in April 2012 - specifically not organised by date like the rest.
The US has normalized so much moral rot and legal breaches in the past few years, all in the interest of making more money... Rarely does a country degrade so much, so fast, and I'm afraid this isn't even the low mark.
It hasn't degraded in such a short time, this rot has been there for 30 odd years. Infrasture, systemic corruption to an unprecedented level (it's always there, but the scale is different), etc.
What happened 'so fast' was how fast they pulled off the mask. 10 years and it's practically off in its entirety...
As someone who was around during Reagan, you are correct. The turn happened in the 80s, and then rapidly accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, then rapidly accelerated again in the past 10 years.
I think a lot of folks are stuck on the idea that it's been a singular bad actor -- a Trump, or a McConnell or something. This "Great Man Theory" is almost certainly a very naive read of the systems that are leading to this moment.
The real shame is that the next "best" countries are.. China? and the European countries pushing for age verification and sweeping surveillance and apparently bent on destroying the freedoms that made them better than China & Russia..
I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end.
As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a case exist.
Age verification isn’t moral rot even if you disagree with it. The rot is the obvious corruption and legal system that only applies to average people which billionaires constantly violate.
> They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.
lmao have you realized how absurd such numbers are (even though I'd assume the 100,000,000 can only be a hyperbole, or are you actually serious with it? Having a single child policy for a long while is not the same as "forced abortion" if that's what you're referring to. The thing called "contraceptives" exists) if you use your common sense for just a second?
Seems that it's you who got fed a lot of propaganda unfortunately.
And yes there have been a lot of disasters throughout the history, even not so long ago (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc.), but if you're suggesting that's what the current regime is doing in 2026, you have no clue.
It's possible the JSTOR charges were in some way motivated by the earlier PACER incident
In the JSTOR case he installed a python script on his own laptop, connected it to MIT's network and left the script running for months
In the PACER case, the computer he used did not belong to him. It was a government computer in a federal building primarily used by lawyers. He installed a perl script on the government's computer and left it running for weeks
It does not appear he ever asked anyone for permission to do this
It's surprising he avoided CFAA charges for the PACER incident
Did he exceed authorized access to a "protected computer"
For purposes of the CFAA it does not matter if the documents were public information
Perhaps there are libraries that welcome patrons installing scripts on their publicly accessible computers without permission, then leaving the scripts running on their networks, downloading 1000's of documents
Maybe MIT would not care. But there is every reason to believe the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals would care
This is not to suggest he deserved his fate, only that the PACER incident mattered. Perhaps more than the JSTOR one
A key aspect folks should understand about US Copyright Law is that it much more severely penalizes infringement with distributing, or an intent to distribute, unauthorized copies than to just consume privately. Distributing unauthorized copies is a federal crime (which can escalate to a felony based on various factors) whereas doing whatever for private use is usually a much milder civil liability.
If you look at all the much publicized piracy trials around the Napster era, they invariably came down to the defendant distributing the works they downloaded.
This explains why the AI giants are legally fine doing what they're doing. They are explicitly not distributing copies of the work they acquired (although Meta apparently torrented some stuff, which seeds i.e. distributes data by default, and so might be in trouble to that extent) and training AI has so far been ruled to be fair use. Which, technically, makes sense; encoding patterns gleaned from billions of texts into weights is clearly different from distributing exact copies, and if you look at the cases where LLMs can be made to regurgitate content verbatim, it only really works for a handful of extremely popular books.
This also explains how whatever happened with Aaron Swartz, as tragic as it was, is qualitatively different from what is happening with LLMs. He very explicitly scraped all that content with the specific intention of distributing it. On the other hand, AI companies are literally destroying mountains of books to comply with the law.
You could call this tragic on multiple levels, but not hypocritical.
A German publisher is currently sueing OpenAI, because they think it is distributing unauthorized copies of its work. [1] It's in German, but I think the example picture speaks for itself. So essentially big tech is doing exactly what the torrenters were persecuted for. I still think big tech will be treated differently.
Hmm, not familiar with what's happening in Germany or its copyright laws, but I do recall coming across this piece of news, where OpenAI was indeed found guilty of infringement, so I don't think Big Tech is being treated differently: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/11/chatgpt-v...
Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call.
Aaron Swartz was the victim of a witch hunt, plain and simple. The prosecutor that came after him (Carmen Ortiz) has never suffered any negative consequences for coming after him in such an injust way. She should.
> Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call.
I don't think it's a judgment call, the level to escalate seems to be pretty specific and at an extremely low scale, specifically unauthorized distribution "of at least 10 copies OR 1 or more copyrighted works with a retail value > $2,500" and the penalties are pretty severe, including imprisonment for "up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both."
arguing that the application of the law was as expected to people who point out how unjust the expected application of the law is is pointless.
ideally, we would see a stronger legal reaction to the biggest IP heist in history but clearly it's not what's happening. it's only natural for people to criticize the current system until a change for the better materializes, while doing so draw attention to extreme cases such as Aaron's.
But my point it is not an unjust application of the law, the law is specifically structured to treat certain behaviors as worse than others. IMO that is actually fair in theory: We do NOT want to punish people who casually pirate stuff for private use, but we probably do want to punish and deter bad actors who want to profit off of the work of others'.
Aaron Swartz's case was actually neither -- you could say he wanted to "liberate" information for the "public good" -- but unfortunately the law has no provision for that and all his actions were consistent with how the law specifies the bad actor case, which is what escalated things drastically.
In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far, but I honestly wish these could be used to prosecute people who are treated differently for the same crime because of their status, or at least set a precedent that such activities are definitively okay.
> In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far
> Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides.
Hundreds of innocent people went to prison, were financially ruined, thirteen took their own life, because a well-funded entity found it easier to privately prosecute its contractors than to question its software vendor. And the court system let them do it.
For some insane reason I am unable to comprehend, the UK government still allows Fujitsu to bid on government software contracts, despite being responsible for all of the false imprisonments, trauma, and tragedy you laid you in your post.
I have a feeling Fujitsu took the blame for mistakes done by the Post Office in order to get future contracts. The contracts are padded to pay fines and damages.
I understand the government would have difficulty excluding Fujitsu under its own procurement regulations at the time (Public Contracts Regulations 2015). Fujitsu voluntarily withdrew its bids in 2024. The goverment passed the Procurement Act 2023 which came into force in February 2025 and there is now a national debarment list, though I note Fujitsu isn't on it.
Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its own subpostmasters.
Some US states still have private criminal prosecutions.
> Second, this Article demonstrates that the government monopoly on
prosecution is an ideology rather than a rule. As it turns out, the government has never had total control over criminal law enforcement—not even exclusive authority to charge someone with a crime. While some courts prohibited private prosecution in the nineteenth century, others refused to abolish the practice. Public prosecutions of felonies and federal offenses became the norm in the progressive era, but private prosecution persisted in various forms. Particularly in “lowly” municipal courts, private individuals retained the ability to file and litigate criminal cases.
In Australia at least, the Director of Public Prosecutions has the power to take over the matter, and they often do.
They can then do one of two things. They can either continue running it if it’s in the interests of justice to do so (public interest, reasonable prospects of success etc), or they can shut it down, as they tend to do for sovereign citizen nonsense and the like.
> 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.
This is really a problem with companies vs. individuals breaking laws in general. There is a perverse incentive for prosecutors to not go after companies unless they have an airtight case because a company will be able to afford to defend themselves with an army of lawyers and even if they cannot win they will drag out the case. Meanwhile individuals can be pressured into accepting a plea deal with much flimsier evidence because the potential consequences can be life altering.
I think it's self-evident that that every legal system is both imperfect and unevenly-applied, being a finite resource. It's also a self-evidence truth that money & power buy resistance to the the legal system.
It's hard to put a definition on "unfair", but we all recognise it when we see it. That's why the case of Aaron Swartz is so very visceral for most of us.
I get the sentiment "Aaron paid while Meta and its likes are getting away", but what will we gain by getting them to pay pennies? We still can't do what Meta is doing, legally, that is the problem
We need to repeal anti-circumvention laws, and yes, it means we might legally be able to do to Meta and its likes what they've been doing to all of us
The legal system and government these days are mostly tools for oppression of the working class. Most people would be better off without any laws at all and just talking things out with their neighbours, employers and employees; refusing any form of unearned trust or authority.
Democracy doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately; nobody has any ideas who they're voting for... Photos can be faked, videos can be faked, candidates can be pre-selected during primaries. Worse than that; each individual is shown different facts so nobody even agrees on the basic facts. So literally people are voting for constructed, imaginary individuals who don't exist outside of their heads. Also, there are too many people voting for too few representatives. This guarantees poor representation.
The legal system should be replaced by some kind of vigilante justice hybrid like in the old Roman system were people would be exonerated for taking revenge on just grounds. It's impossible for the legal system to be fair anyway. The closest to justice we can achieve is through decentralization.
IMO, the role of government is to dismantle any large organisations which compete against it for power and control and shield individuals against those organisations.
Calling him "effectively assassinated" is ridiculous.
He was offered a plea deal of 6 months in jail. Which he turned down. And then he killed himself - something which he attempted multiple times in the past when he wasn't being prosecuted for anything
Carmen Ortiz should have been disbarred over this, it was a shameful episode. Instead she retained her position for years and now is presumably quite wealthy as partner in a prominent Boston law firm.
Because he planned to make the data public, Meta just wants to use it to enrich its shareholders. See also: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and every other big player in this space besides.
There’s also the fact that Swartz was physically trespassing and attaching unauthorized machines into networking closets to run scraping on a university network to exfiltrate the scrapes to the public, versus just scraping public facing web from the public web to train a model. That’s a little different and while the feds were heavy-handed against Swartz these computer crime laws were well known and it was less heavy handed than the hacker crackdowns of the 90s if you want to look at precedents.
Not sure what your point is - the articles they trained on are
copyrighted and not theirs to open source. The only they can legally open source is the weights, which they have done repeatedly.
My point is both Aaron was trying to make the journals public and Meta made models that encapsulate data from the journals public.
This bothers me big time. One my forums got hit by 200k to 280k requests over a 15 minute interval multiple days. I ended up just blocking the whole range /16
do we have a better understanding of mental health on this forum now to both acknowledge the overzealous nature of the prosecution and also view Aaron’s life ending choice as an individual one
Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.
USA never was a democracy, same as many other countries, including UK.
These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now.
Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1.
It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.
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 would make in a couple months for selling user data and whatnot.
This is something that every company gets away with mainly I think because of just how large their wealth actually is. It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. Punishing an individual is easy.
I don’t know if there’s really a solution at this point, maybe we could’ve prevented this reality at some point in the past but I don’t think that without actual global collapse it would be something that can be retroactively changed, and I don’t know if global collapse would necessarily lead to a better future.
I think that for one, Zuckerberg should be in prison, if someone oversees a massive theft like this, I think they should be held criminally liable. Same the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI for their parts in the massive theft that took place. They should all be doing prison time.
The reason I don’t think they will is that their investors probably have a good amount of leverage over anyone who would prosecute them, so it would never make it that far.
> 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.
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.
> and like I already said punishment is hard specifically because how do you fine someone with infinite money?
This isn't true though, if they had infinite money they wouldn't be spending every single second of their waking existence trying to get more of it and move higher on the leaderboard. If your opinion is that Meta/Zuck wouldn't care about being fined a year's worth of global revenue, or in his personal case, 90% of his net worth, then I'd really like to hear why. Because it contradicts all of their actual actions showing that all they care about is hoarding as much money as possible, meaning they'd very much care about it being taken away. Maybe I'm missing something.
I mean, total societal collapse would absolutely suck, and there's indeed no guarantee that whatever will replace it won't fall into similar traps eventually, but if things actually are as you describe them, it only can get worse and worse indefinitely, until we get to global collapse anyway.
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.
98% of the commenters here have no idea what Swartz was actually charged with, or what he actually did. Here are a couple of articles that cover this from an expert in the relevant areas of law [1] [2].
Also, due to the very stupid way the DoJ calculates potential sentences in their press releases, almost everyone thinks defendants are facing much more prison time than they actually have any remotely realistic chance of receiving. Here's an article on that [3].
Briefly, if some hypothetical criminal committed some specific crime in the worst way possible, hitting many of the checkmarks that make it worse (such underage victim, victim is a law or government official or relative of one, victim was restrained, hate crime, terrorism, organized crime was involved, they were a manager or supervisor in that organized crime, they abuse a position of trust, they used a minor to help with the crime, they used threats to impede the investigation, they committed reckless endangerment while fleeing arrest, and the crime was committed while they were out on bond or bail from another federal crime) and could get a sentence of N years then N years is what the DoJ states in the press release.
Doesn't matter that the actual person being charged has none of those, or that they have some of the circumstances that can lower sentences (such as acceptance of responsibility, only minor involvement, helped investigating or prosecuting another person, diminished capacity, they self reported their crime before authorities discover it, they were coerced into participating, and some more) and there's basically no chance they will get anything more than maybe a few months of parole...it is going to say N years in the press releases.
Actually, it might even say some multiple of N, because they often charge the person with multiple things based on the same underlying harm. For example if you kill one person that might be first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter.
They might charge you with all of those (which does make sense--they are going to try to prove all the elements of first degree murder, but if they fail to prove of them they might still prove the elements of one of the others). If the jury comes back and convicts on several of them all but the most severe one will be used for sentencing. But the DoJ press release will probable make it sounds like you could serve N years for each of them.
It's completely ridiculous. They have the details of what they are charging the person with. They know about all those factors that increase or decrease sentences. They could do the math and give a realistic sentence in the press release.
If you cut down a couple acres of forest you own because you want to have a hay field or whatever you're <screech> violating federal environmental law <screech>
But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things on their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local commissioner.
What happened to Aaron Swartz is little different.
It seems to be how people view things, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's like the outrage when wealthy people get off on charges. Usually it is because they have the resources to demand the justice that should be afforded to everyone. You shouldn't be outraged at the privileged being treated fairly. You should be outraged at the many many instances of the unprivileged being treated unfairly.
Rather than making others suffer to balance things out, removing suffering on the other side has the same effect.
One of the reasons big companies still get away on things like these is because fines are pocket change to them and top level executives ever face a real prison sentence at all.
They have already done the legal work and the math in advance, and because the numbers are on their side they get away with it.
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.
No complaints from me about for profit insurance companies withholding treatment. They are doing the Lord’s work. We need them. Stephen Helmsley deserves more than $61 million a year.
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.
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.
not the OP but the heaviest charges against Swartz didn't stem from his IP infringement, it was wire fraud and computer fraud. He used a network access and MIT guest account he didn't have legal access to because he wasn't affiliated with the institution, which enabled the CFAA charges.
Ok and so what? We have been informed of an injustice, we are now angry. Now what? What do we want? Do we agree that the prosecution was unjust and wrong, celebrate that Meta is not being criminally prosecuted, lash out at the publishers filing the lawsuit and advocate for an official apology from the prosecutors and government that went after Aaron?
Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”?
Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?
I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no?
As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produced by corporate social media explains both its attraction and its resilience in the face of more democratic and emancipatory alternatives.
> I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no?
But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him?
We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".
The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him.
There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).
Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
RIP Aaron.
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 means justice for ALL; we might be able to prevent the next Aaron Swartz.
Edit: As someone that has done both state and fed time, the thing that makes me the saddest here is that the charges would have been drastically reduced if not dismissed and his appeals would have had a high probability of success. They use this "scare tatic" so much and I understand why it works; the possibility of facing those years is terrifying. I don't mean that in any demeaning manner, 25/26 and never having done time I cannot imagine how terrified he must have been.
Edit: I would also like to bring attention to the fact that M. Zuckerberg aggressively pursues these types of cases against people for doing far less than he has done.
"Maybe the real issue is selective outrage about legal injustice."
The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
> 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 enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws.
A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore.
Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.
>> A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is repealed and no one can be charged with it anymore.
This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.
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.
TBTF is not a thing. It's all in your mind. Evergrande and Country Garden would've been classified TBTF in the minds of many USians, yet they failed.
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
> 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.
Off topic:
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
If you see such a comment, you can vouch for it (small menu point next to flag) and revive it. I did that now because I agree with your assessment - of late I do this very often because even comments which quote articles/laws etc. verbatim and with a link are flagged/voted to death.
I do this and did it in this case, but I've never seen it make a difference.
Both of your supposed counterexamples are Chinese. China does things differently from the USA.
My counterexamples prove exactly the point; TBTF is fugazi, arbitrary, something in your head.
Because two companies in China aren't it, it doesn't exist?
Ideally what would happen is the corporation starts having enforcement action against it and then its leadership is forced out to rescue said corporation from failing.
This certainly seems better than just making TBTF (which I assume means too big to fail) entities be above the law.
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.
This is basically asking for discovery of another case when you are being suing for one case.
I think the US court system is famous for being slow. Not sure if anyone wants to make it go even slower.
Congress (and state legislatures) pass laws, but don’t necessarily authorize the resources to prosecute all offenders, so prosecutors are given some latitude who to target.
IANAL, but my understanding is this: Malicious prosecution is a defense. Selective enforcement is not. The difference is for judges and juries to decide.
"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.
I think part of the balance is that law requires discretion because humans are not good at making deny lists which the law boils down to.
That's just conceding that you don't actually want to have laws and really only want to punish people when you don't like them.
That's pretty reductive. Or do you not see a difference for example between someone speeding to get to the hospital vs speeding to elude police after a bank robbery?
In fact most people are okay with selectively stretching time limits and elevating a low class misdemeanor into a felony in order to prosecute someone where the party who would be the injured party said there was no injury.
And lest people think this is a one way street, each side thinks the other deserves interpreting the law to “get the real baddies.”
Our system has that built in. You can only be punished as to the norm and standards, findings can create precedent for other cases, etc. The workaround is they just use an 'as applied standard' so that it only can 'apply' to the one case due to that case's unique 'circumstances'. They do it all the time to prevent precedents from being set. 'As applied' rules are excluded from setting precedent.
As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to prevent establishing legal norms from judicial findings the way our system is supposed to.
> If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down
I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.
Going after every possible case would be staggeringly expensive for marginal gain, the cost society would massively exceed the benefits. Yes the system as it is that relies on discretion, but there’s always discretion involved, and we rely on separation of powers, public pressure, etc to act to try and correct excesses. Of course that is not guaranteed to work, and won’t work perfectly, but no system will. Societies are dynamic systems.
It’s all well and good until the person who has that discretion comes after you personally.
Careful there, you're attempting to introduce elements of reason and justice into law. When has that ever worked?
For the in-crowd the law protects but does not bind. For the out-crowd, the law binds but does not protect.
Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.
“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”
The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides
Maybe from here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12517091-conservatism-consi...
It originated in a comment on a blog: https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
I don't read CT anymore but it was one of the great ones.
That was it.
Perfectly equal enforcement really isn't possible, but it should be the policy to enforce in proportion to active harm. The bigger the ongoing active harm, the quicker to react we should be. Some individual torrents a single movie? NBD. No matter the side of the argument you are on this should be ignored. A company intentionally throws content strikes causing legitimate harm to large numbers of content creators? That should addressed.
Reality should always have a place in the law.
Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.
In the US speeding can lead to your license being removed and then you can't drive at all. Speeding is not just a fine.
Again, this is a wealth tax. Rich get driven around and don't loose their jobs for loosing their license. Try being poor though and having this happen.
Edit: should have said 'poor tax'
Being poor is no excuse for breaking the law. If you can't afford having your license revoked then don't do things that can get your license revoked.
That's a straw man though. The argument isn't that poor people should get to break traffic laws but that those who can afford to loose their license shouldn't get to break them either.
Quick question, without looking it up, can you list the number of laws you can break which will result in your license revocation?
The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.
Proposals like this are how you get the billionaire paying their chauffeur's $50 fines so they can get everywhere faster while sticking some small business owner in an industry with feast or famine years with a $50,000 ticket for having a slightly miscalibrated speedometer.
Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
It is a common complaint that fixed penalties are just the fee the rich get to pay to break the law. Doubly so for big corporations especially when the penalties are less than the gain they got doing the harm.
It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed.
Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?
It's a common complaint but the complaint is ridiculous because the penalties already scale with the scope of the activity. It's typical when you sue a corporation for the penalty for willful violations to be treble damages, i.e. three times the actual damages. If you rip customers off by $10,000 then you pay $30,000. If you're huge and rip customers off by $10 billion then you pay $30 billion.
Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels.
The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement.
And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.
Penalties are not just to compensate for the harm done but also to incentivize against doing the harm in the first place. This only works if penalties * p(getting convicted) > profit. p(getting convicted) very much depends no the size of the entity so penalties need to be increased accordingly to attain the same deterrent effect.
Being able to game a naive implementation of such scaling is not an argument for not scaling penalties but for designing the concrete implementation to be hard to game and/or applying even higher penalties when someone has been found to try to game the system - which is something that should be done more in general.
We can absolutely make it so that people hiring private chauffeurs share in the liability for breaking traffic laws just like we can absolutely hold CEOs liable for illegal activities done by employees under their purview.
This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes.
Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).
The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.
It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
> This isn't arbitrage, it's looking for loopholes.
"Have someone who pays the lower amount do the thing" is precisely arbitrage.
> That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).
Their income for the last three years was $10k, $10k and $1M. Their 20 year average is $80k but the three year average is $340k. So now you're increasing their exposure even more -- before they get a hugely disproportionate fine if it happens to be in the one year they made $1M. Now they still get a disproportionate fine but are exposed to it for three times as long.
> The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.
Michael Dell hails a cab and then the driver gets a speeding ticket. No evidence driver had any idea of his passenger's net worth; no evidence the passenger ever requested exceeding the speed limit and couldn't see the speedometer from the back seat. Is this a billion dollar fine? Who pays it, the person who has nothing like a billion dollars or the person who did nothing wrong?
It's clearly unreasonable to impose the fine in that case, but it's also easy to use it for arbitrage if you don't.
> It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
Maybe we should have a preference for rules that are effective rather than performative.
So long story short: adapt that rule so the beneficiary of the fraudulent service pays the bill. There, I fixed it.
"John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
Not quite how he phrased it, but close. Original is here: https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/
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.
>...Not quite how he phrased it, but close.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" quote is from Ronald Wright. The Steinbeck quote is actually very different than the Ronald Wright quote.
The actual quote is mocking wealthy armchair leftists rather than explaining why the American working class rejected socialism:
>>Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: “After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?” Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picnickers on her property. ...
Even flat-out rejecting the desire to charge them more wouldn't be bending over backwards for them. It would simply be charging them based on harm done rather than what affects them.
And the post you're responding to is making a much less extreme position, that it's hard to scale the fine properly.
With laws, you generally want to charge and cover for the harm done, but also to disincentivise law breaking.
For instance, someone might be significantly speeding for 10 years, and never hurting anyone or causing any harm (financial or otherwise). Should they pay nothing?
Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?
But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
> Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?
Yes, that one. Increasing everyone's risk is harm, sorry if I wasn't clear about that part.
> But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
The line of thought here is: Does it matter? If the average speeder pays $2 of fines per $1 of harm, it's a net positive. Yes that does let rich people buy priority. But rich people can usually buy priority. At least they're not getting a helicopter involved.
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 an easy to look up expert answer, and you don't worry about the details of each case.
> how can you even be sure how much has speeding and not something else mainly contributed to the harm
We have some useful numbers on the impact of speeding, and for something like this assume the worst plausible impact.
Edit: If there's around 1 death per hundred million vehicle miles and it's worth ten million dollars, that's ten cents of death per mile. If a quarter of deaths have speeding as a factor and we exaggerate that to 100% blame, that's 2.5 cents per mile divided by how rare speeding is. If we guess 15% of people are speeding at any moment, that's 17 cents of damage per mile. To pay double they'd need a $200 ticket every 600 miles of speeding.
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.
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.
Got it, thanks for the correction: it does surprisingly line up!
So then you outlaw that, too. It is an idea with merit to be refined not rejected outright because you found the one flaw. Under the current system, the wealthy can speed themsleves and pay small fines.
Perfect may not be possible but with AI society will be able to scale law enforcement to way more than what a few individual officers can handle.
And it will still have the amazing characteristics we see today.
[dead]
The violation of the law as practiced is that a Little Person did this and threatened a Player's profits. A Player can do what they like to another and form some kind of mutually beneficial arrangement afterward... but Schwartz did not have enough commas in his bank account to be allowed to dabble, not a single investor behind him. Nor was his goal the overriding morally correct goal of maximizing social stratification through profit seeking. Knocking down paywalls is dead weight loss, not market predation. He had to go. He had to be made an example of. For the system, this was personal.
It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but without all of the constraints associated with having a body.
A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.
Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but
The 1860s?
Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?
This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.
>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't
Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...
But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
The root problem here is that I have no voice and have no real friends to join forces with. I literally have zero power to change the system. Wealth inequality puts my interests at odds with those who benefit from the current system.
At my level as a software engineer, it's impossible to make friends because everyone is trying to back-stab each other constantly. It's extremely low trust.
You can't change the laws of your country when you're so alone that you can't even trust colleagues you see every day.
I had a co-founder/friend (past tense) whose background was in HR and he wanted to build a tool to help software devs find jobs and he was telling me that referrals is the best way to get a job... I had to explain to him how cut-throat the competition is with engineers... They're not going to give referrals for people they only met online. I mean, inside the company, some colleagues are trying to sabotage or slander each other over a promotion. Not friend material.
Just to give an idea of my experience with referrals (and low-trust environment) as a software engineer; I only provided a referral for 'ex-colleagues/friends' twice in my career; first time was a guy who didn't have a job who was in open source and I had known online and spoke regularly for 2 years; they literally lied to my boss and backstabbed me and didn't even join the company... I didn't do any referrals after that... For years... But eventually I met another engineer who was very good and a nice guy and I thought "this guy is smart and friendly and he explicitly asked me for a referral" so I gave his details to my employer... But he got cold feet and although he didn't slander me to my boss with salacious lies, his cold feet made me look bad. So that's it, I don't do referrals anymore.
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The point here is that as you stated: "you still do not understand". For those of us that have been under the thumb of the judicial system it can feel like the world is on you. We have no idea of his mental state, we have no idea of the nuance or motivation but what I do think we know is that the actions of the state here far exceeded any interpretation of what would be deemed an appropriate punishment for the said "crime" committed. What we do understand is that if he hand not been attacked by an over-zealous prosecutor there is a far greater probability he would have been able to handle the situation in a logical manner and maybe even still be here today to defend himself.
We are not asserting that any specific outcome is empirically superior to another just that given the facts of the case, it was not adjudicated fairy given what we know of similar cases.
Yes. 100%, the idea that we are all equal under the law is a joke.
And the worst part is that it looks that way from the perspective of the people at the top. You only understand that it's not the case if you are not among the privileged few.
So your point about "We have no idea of his mental state" is highly pertinent. I also would emphasize that he was a highly rational guy and his mental state was likely a rational consequence of his environment.
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You are a coward; which is why you cannot use your name or identity and only feel comfortable insulting people online because it makes you feel like a big bad keyboard warrior.
I feel bad for you because not only is your argument irrational and baseless its not even entertaining. I am not one of the "thugs" that harassed him. I never met him; but I was a huge fan. I am also not employed by anyone that would participate in such things. If you had even a modicum of intelligence you would just look at my other post and easily infer as such.
I suggest you drink some water, check-in with a loved one and get some rest.
Be well.
Commiserations on the abuse from that sockpuppet. Please don't let it dent your enthusiasm for the community: you are welcome, and i wish you long life and health.
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>How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs
Knowledge is power.
So, pay for access, or go to your local library, or browse the internet, or get free access in a similar way that Aaron Swartz did? Knowledge often requires funding to be created in the first place.
Why does every research team and lab use SciHub and/or Library Genesis?
I mean, they don’t, exclusively, or no-one would be giving money to JSTOR. And certainly, no-one would be scanning millions of old journal articles for free.
Comparatively few individuals are giving money to JSTOR these days.
Mostly institutions that they’ve previously captured.
And yes: not sure how you missed it, but for like a decade or more people have been scanning in millions of papers and books.
I don't know where people get the idea that JSTOR is one of the bad guys. It's a non-profit that scans old journal articles that would otherwise be a huge pain to access. It costs money to do that. What specifically have they done that you disapprove of?
I don’t know where you got the idea I was talking about my opinion of JSTOR.
Beats me what you're talking about, then. The literal answer to your original question is that people use SciHub and Library Genesis because they're free. But they're free because they infringe copyright. Maybe Swartz was opposed to copyright per se or maybe he was trying to make a point about free availability of journal articles associated with publicly funded research. Either way, JSTOR is the wrong target. JSTOR doesn't hold the copyright on those articles. JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access – which is exactly what Swartz seemed to be in favor of.
It’s free AND convenient.
Shortening path and timelines to info, innovation, further research.
That’s the end of the calculation.
The rest is just money-clutching noise.
> JSTOR does actual legit work to make scientific articles easier to access
Just link (or specifically mention) a few things they’ve done that people really appreciate.
No need to keep repeating the claim.
JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives. That's useful to anyone who wants to read an old journal article without going to a physical library. I used to have to go to the library, dig out the relevant issue of Linguistic Inquiry, and photocopy it. Then in 2015, JSTOR started providing access to the entire scanned Linguistic Inquiry archive, so I could access all of those issues digitally.
I don't understand what you mean by "money-clutching noise" in your other comment. I think enabling free universal public access to historical journal articles would be a great idea. However, some public money would then need to go towards the costs of that, and some reform of copyright law might also be needed.
> JSTOR provides digital access to print journal archives
So does SciHub.
SciHub mainly redistributes scans of print archives made by JSTOR and other organisations. And it does not have everything that JSTOR has. For example, this paper is not, as far as I can tell, available on SciHub:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/4178697
Somehow, you appreciate SciHub without appreciating one of the organizations that did the actual work necessary to make many of those PDFs exist in the first place:
https://about.jstor.org/news/jstor-and-apex-covantage-mark-2...
Are you being intentionally obtuse?
If the JSTOR copy didn’t exist, the pre-print copy would be scraped from the author’s website,
or the text / results submitted by the author or someone close anonymously.
Less, more slowly, but the same point.
Sure, we’ll scrape journal articles from the 1950s from the authors’ websites...
Many more recent articles also aren’t available on the authors’ websites, such as the one I linked.
Public money does go to the costs of that.
That’s where most of the PDFs come from.
Hmm, no. In the case of old print journal archives scanned by JSTOR, it's JSTOR paying the cost of the scanning.
Anyone can scan, host, and curate - including one or many peers.
We do not need any entity in between researchers and other researchers.
Practically speaking, no-one is going to scan centuries' worth of historical journal articles for free. And JSTOR isn’t really an entity outside the research community; it’s a non-profit that grew from within it.
I think we’re talking past each other mostly because I start to lose value on most research for my topics of interest that are more than two or three decades old, let alone five or six.
This may be different for others.
Hi @dang, the reason I've flagged this account is not this comment itself, but the extremely suspicious account with the same creation date that posted vile abuse to arionhardison.
How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs?
Example 1: antibiotic and antiviral production technology for developing countries. Even if we limit ourselves to out-of-patent molecules, the primary literature describing the discovery, production, modification and testing of life-saving antibiotics was, at the time of Aaron Swartz, largely hidden behind strict paywalls that typically were accessed through a university library subscription. Access to all that information allows countries and institutions with very limited resources to set up generic medical production pipelines for life-saving medications they couldn’t afford to import - or to become international market competitors to established interests.
Again, that’s just restricting the argument to out-of-patent products that can be generically manufactured with no legal issues. What about life-saving but patented products that are too expensive for poor countries and regions to buy on the open market? Does that added-value IP charge justify unnecessary deaths in such cases?
And about that IP - the vast majority of paywalled research literature was produced with taxpayer funds delivered via government funding agencies, and there’s a very good legal argument that this alone puts it into the public domain. If private companies want to set up Bell Labs 2.0 with no government funding and patent everything they discover, that’s their own capex risk, but just hovering around and scooping up publicly funded discoveries via exclusive licensing deals with universities and researchers makes no sense - instead, patents should be available to any citizen of the government that put up the funds, and research papers should be available to anyone.
As far as the argument that widespread distribution of the knowledge to produce antibiotic, antiviral, and other complex biomolecular products represents a biological weapons risk? Notably that’s why no LLM provider service will help develop technical protocols for antibiotics production, or insulin, or anything similar - claimed dual-use risk fears. This conveniently slows the rise of legitimate independent competition in the pharmaceutical sector, which helps if the goal is maximizing profit margins via monopoly power. Bioweapons production realistically requires nation-state or large-corporation scale resources, and the solution is not obfuscation of basic knowledge but rather international treaties, select agent rules, laboratory operation and equipment purchase licensing requirements, etc.
That’s just one sector - there are at least a dozen other examples besides biomolecular drugs of ‘how it would help the world’ to make all published research literature available to anyone with a network connection, ask any LLM to enumerate them.
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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.
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.
Whoever can create an objective way to determine the quality of legal representation is onto a real winner.
I find it near impossible, even as someone with a lot of legal knowledge, to tell whether a lawyer I hire is going to advocate zealously and correctly and comprehensively on my part once I hand over my retainer. They all talk a great game.
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.
And that's another advantage corporations have over individuals. If you break the law at scale you can afford to retain lawyers and evaluate them based on past performance.
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
Not all legal professionals are good, and not all are even working in the interests of their clients.
The real issue is that in the US, everything is for sale.
Humans have incentives everywhere. Its not quite the same.
I dont think anyone bought the judge or prosecutor for Aaron
My implication wasn't that there'd be "low level" corruption of that nature, but that there's "high level" corruption in both instances; The direction to prosecute Aaron Swartz, and not investigate Meta, are both driven by an interest of the State to protect large enterprises, rather than citizens.
If we consider campaign financing and lobbying, I don't think it's a stretch to believe that almost any outcome can be bought in the US if there's enough money involved.
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 someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
> The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.
That's the racket. Getting any jailtime for "mass downloading" is a severe penalty, but that gets turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
> turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
John Kiriakou talks often about his own lawyers showing up at his house to convince him to take the deal. And then ending up in a higher security prison.
https://youtu.be/b-wc8tRNoJk?t=980 Has some context around what went down with him going to jail in case one is unaware.
> maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied
and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case.
If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get it, but that's far from the case.
You keep shifting the goal posts...
He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts.
Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.
I think you're being hysterical. Getting threatened for 35 years in jail is absurd for the crime. Stating "oh well it would never have actually _been_ 35 years" is akin to pretending to punch someone and stopping just before you hit them and then mocking them for flinching.
> I wasn't _actually_ going to hit you, quit being a baby.
Which is why its actually illegal to do that to people in a lot of places.
My issue is that the sentence is artificial and used for intimidation as opposed to being a rational basis for a justice system. Hence the mafia analogy.
Imagine if the US had a maximum sentence of 35 years for mere possession of a firearm but in practice, it would only be used in very unlikely conditions. It wouldn't last a minute. It's only allowed to be like this because nobody cares about tech.
> Imagine if the US had a maximum sentence of 35 years for mere possession of a firearm but in practice, it would only be used in very unlikely conditions. It wouldn't last a minute. It's only allowed to be like this because nobody cares about tech.
This is effectively how all federal sentencing and reporting about that sentencing works, all the time. A lawyer blogger Popehat has talked about this for years[1]. Headlines pull add up all charges and the maximum statutory sentences for those and report it as if that's even remotely close to a likely outcome and it's not. In fact, Popehat actually wrote about that as it applied to Swartz in the aftermath of his suicide[2].
Which isn't to say that this sort of aggressive intimidation isn't bullshit. It is. But it's also not some unique "nobody cares about tech" thing.[1]: https://www.popehat.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sentenci...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150604204913/http://www.popeha...
> 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 are able to keep it locked behind paywalls is an outrage.
Further, after Swartz returned all the material he had downloaded and agreed not to do it again, both JSTOR and MIT said they were satisfied and no further action was needed (though JSTOR was more emphatic about it than MIT was). Which, combined with the above, should have ended the case then and there.
> 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.
MIT evidently added a camera. Later that day, the MIT police made their first contact with him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
"When it was discovered, a video camera was placed in the room to record Swartz; his computer was left untouched. The recording was stopped once Swartz was identified,"
IME, months-long internal investigations in an org with Secret Service involvement would be unlikely to escape senior management, but I'm just speculating and only have the same info as everyone else. You might be right.
If they were even slightly concerned that the scope went beyond what they were aware of with JSTOR, they would've either immediately contacted police or disconnected the laptop. The timeline in the report outlines that they discovered the laptop at 8am, and were in internal communications with their bosses and MIT's lawyers before someone finally contacted police at 9:45am.
They knew what was going on before they found the laptop. They had been briefed by someone at MIT who was in contact with JSTOR. I suspect that everyone on the networking staff (and possibly most of the university) knew of the JSTOR downloading situation after the second incident in October. JSTOR had blocked MIT for 3 days, and that must have caught people's attention.
Once they found the laptop, they involved police despite knowing to a virtual certainty that the problem with the laptop was that it was scraping JSTOR, again. They didn't know yet that it was Aaron, but they would've known it would turn out to be someone ideologically just like him.
There was nothing suspicious about it. It was simply jeopardizing MIT's contract with JSTOR. The use of a data closet like that was very bad manners.
I don't think the issue is the time in prison.
I think it is the criminal record. Other places in the world, once you've served your time you can often go right back to living. Not that it is easy but it doesn't hang over you.
In the US, once you have a criminal record - any criminal record - there are flow on effects that keep fucking with you for life.
He'd been caught once already, then continued and went around ever barrier they put in place to try and stop him.
Not in this case, also why because it's "digital" does it change anything.
SWATing is "digital" but leads to very real death
> 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:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1870/letters/70_...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.
The con is largely directed at the religious right, of which, poorer whites make up the largest cohort. That's how they convinced people directly targeted by the bigotry to still vote for them.
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.
The two party system is absolutely part of the problem, but there's also definitely the culture war being waged to distract people from the class war that's being waged against them. But the two-party system definitely enables that, making it easier to win by discrediting the other, because there only is one other.
And which party started the culture war? By definition it's not the conservatives.
What do you mean "by definition"? They do nothing else. Against transgenders, against gay people, against foreigners, against hippies, against black people; it goes back a long time, and always to recruit the support of poor white people by giving them a sense of superiority over an even more oppressed group. Culture war is their primary weapon to distract from the class war they're also waging.
Continually inventing new categories of "opressed" people and then demanding that others grant them special protections is exactly how you start a culture war.
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.
> 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
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?
It absolutely is. Youth services is one such thing that people just refuse to get upset about. Not when they attack kids for flimsy reasons. And, conversely, people also utterly refuse to react when kids eventually figure out that their way out is to attack people, other kids, social workers and anyone else in institutions, which is one factor that makes youth services facilities such horrible places to be.
Remember it was MIT that dobbed him in.
MIT then helped the criminal prosecution even after JSTOR settled with him.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case...
And whitewashed their own involvement.
https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...
I mean he was arrested initially not for the material downloaded but the fact that he, not an MIT student, was found hiding in a facilities closet with his laptop hooked into the network.
I get that MIT's police were meant to join him in a chorus of "Information wants to be free", but let's not act like it's unreasonable to want someone arrested or prosecuted who was not authorized to be in an equipment closet with their computer wired into a switch.
And even then, it wasn’t really about justice but more for the prosecutor, Carmen Ortiz’s career advancement.
The case ultimately did not help her in her run for governor of MA.
the blood of a prodigy as status symbol make-up
How does prosecuting someone who downloaded articles in a broom closet help her career advancement?
I suppose in pleasing the right people with money and power.
prosecutors with higher conviction rates are typically viewed more favorably than prosecutors with lower conviction rates.
She could have just never even brought the prosecution in the first place.
im not saying she did the right thing, im just answering the question of "how does prosecuting someone help her career advancement".
The point is the prosecution's case was ultra weak. He rejected a 6 month plea deal because they were confident they would win in court. That's not the kind of case you bring to get ahead in your career
"look at me, I'm serving the interests of the incumbent education and medical industries by prosecuting the shit out of someone who dared give them the bird, now donate to my campaign".
Easy notch on her belt.
Aarons lawyers expected an acquittal which is why he rejected the plea deal of 6 months
In many cases it's "all about the money" (and the lawyers). Take the case of Billionaire hedge fund manager Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital Advisors who was famously pursued by federal prosecutors as their ultimate "white whale" in a massive insider trading probe. Though his firm pleaded guilty and paid a record $1.8 billion fine, Cohen himself was never criminally charged or convicted. Yet two lower underlings were convicted and served time (the 2 fall guys).
An "Army of lawyers", no less than 6 top lawyers appeared in the courtroom that day representing Cohen (he did not appear), as a "shot across the bow" message to the US Government that Cohen was prepared to spend a vast sum of his wealth to defend himself and make it a huge undertaking for the government if they wished to proceed.
Lawyers present for Cohen:
Peter Nussbaum: SAC Capital's General Counsel, who entered the plea.
Theodore "Ted" Wells Jr.: Renowned partner from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Martin Klotz: Partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Cohen's personal attorney.
Michael Schachter, Daniel Kramer, and Michael Gertzman: Senior litigation partners assisting the defense.
Because the defense consisted of prominent partners from multiple top-tier firms simultaneously, analysts famously calculated that the collective group was costing SAC Capital roughly $10,000 an hour (mere pocket change for a successful hedge fund guy).
> Steven A. Cohen
Owner of the New York Mets now, by the way, which maybe non-sports following readers will be happy to hear remain a boondoggle. He tried very hard to spend his way to glory, leading the league in payroll at the beginning of the 2025 season, only to crash and burn and end up in last place this season.
That’s infuriating.
Yes, it's also solvable; the crux of the issue is that these people have made it problematic to even discuss any solutions that do not serve their personal, financial and nationalist interest.
All and any fact should be up for discussion. For example, the black community; my community has a serious problem with violence that has caused increased police presence as it spilled out and impacted other communities. We can discuss the why but the fact exist and its up for discussion.
All discussion of the conditions which allow situations like this to occur are shut down and labeled an ism, ist etc...
It was Carmen Ortiz, not abstract "US Government".
This is the (John Perkin's coined term) "Corporatocracy" at work.
If you want to know how and why it is like this, read Perkin's books (atm I'm reading "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). It's why Meta will not get sued but Aaron was, and it is why ships are now lining up in front of the Panama canal paying as much as 400k for a crossing with little of that wealth making it to the people of Panama.
JSTOR dropped civil litigation only after getting about $25k in the settlement from him.
Meta's bots are spectatularly awful, and if your organisation needs to use facebook advertising, they're also unblockable. There are ways around it that doesn't exactly block them but does clearly communicate they should GTFO, but it just shows you what an awful company Meta is.
Who was it ? The ^US government^ .. or for that matter, any government or corporation doesn't pursue litigation. It is humans who make this decision (at least for now ...).
Who in the government bureaucracy made the decision and followed through? It's sad that we've become accustomed to accept governments/corporations as entities by themselves when they clearly aren't.
> The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
It does, but it's not like that's new information to minority communities.
I believe JSTOR did, and then backed off after public outcry. JSTOR is not an admirable operation, for this and many other reasons.
I think the root problem is Corporations being Legal Persons.
An alternative would be the CEO to be the “legal person” of each Corp. and be the one against all legal actions should be targeted.
In that case it would Zack himself the one facing any legal action.
A Corp’s actions result to the death of a person. CEO should be trialed as if they were the one driving the car.
The issue is limited liability. I don't think companies should shield stockholder, shareholders, or owners from any liability
While this sounds good in theory, I suspect the actual result would be much worse for justice in most cases. With the corporation acting as its own legal entity, if you are wronged, you sue and obtain justice from the corporation. If instead you needed to sue each and every shareholder to obtain their share of the liabilities, you'd likely spend many more years in court as each individual owner argues why they aren't personally liable for the given act because they didn't have knowledge, or control over the specific chain of events that caused you harm, and the courts have to sort out each individual case.
I think you missed the point: you can still take damages from the corporation, but if corporation cannot provide them (bankrupcy), owners are held liable for them instead. This is how non-LLC companies are treated.
The instrument of Limited Liability exists to encourage business formation and risk taking for small businesses to kick off.
The way large corporations and rich individuals would structure their projects into a number of corporation-owned LLCs is an obvious gap being addressed in law systems throughout the world.
That would make everyone who has a 401K, IRA, mutual fund, ETF or stocks liable for every action made by the companies invested in. That would be insane.
I am not making a judgement call, merely describing what the GP meant.
I do believe it is not as clear cut though — taking it to an extreme, imagine you directly invested in Epstein's sexual abuse business but only as minority owner. Should you be held liable or not? Now let's extend that to a pyramid scheme lending business. Or a company using child labour? When can we claim immunity and when not?
the government is made up of the people. the people are mostly greedy because our culture worships wealth. broken people, broken culture, broken government.
He was done in by a career prosecutor who just wanted to use him as a stepping stone in their path. They had little or no humanity.
Luigi Mangione
Is that not how it always goes? Robbing a bank got you in jail a lot longer than assaulting a woman.
This is an argument against capitalism.
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
>Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
This has always been the case. It's why lots of us who came up in the 80s and 90s embraced the "fuck corporations" and "information wants to be free" zeitgeist of the times.
It's also why the corporate bootlicking on this site is so grating at times. IDK, maybe I'm the only one but it seems like the veneer has worn off and over the last couple years I've realized HN is "special", not because of the reasons its proponents will recite but because it's where you come to post about the interesting technical challenges you solved while designing a system that goes down to the corner store and buys Hitler a pack of his favorite smokes and everyone laps that up.
I feel like you just made the opposite case you actually made
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Yes, you know why - it had nothing to do with copyright infringement - he was going to win the fight to get money out of politics.
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 older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw.
I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands.
It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.
> He was a bright and broken child
i wasn't there and i didn't know him, but talking about a 26 year old man like this makes it seem like you're just taking away his autonomy
Aaron was a figure in the community for a long time, beginning when he was a child
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broken child?
Citation please
"One of the early victories for me was persuading a young boy of 14 or 15 years of age, named Aaron Swartz, to become the technical architect of the Creative Commons. It took a little persuading, but I told him that this is what he had to do." --Lawrence Lessig
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Cost_of_...
Doctorow, Kottke and others didn't seem to think it was odd that a 14 year old was being flown around the country without his parents present. They pre-gamed at a house instead of a bar because Aaron was too young; the host, then nearly twice his age, later dated him. Didn't end well. And then things really didn't end well.
Epstein made his first contribution to MIT that same year (2002). Lessig arranged for Joi Ito to meet Aaron a year later. According to MIT, Joi Ito met Epstein for the first time one month after Aaron died in 2013.
In the most charitable reading of the situation, Aaron was robbed of his childhood.
> I don't like talking about this
I can see why it's difficult, but I think your post provides some much-needed context.
I strongly dislike this comment because it's the type of thing some anonynmous person can post online with no credibility or accountability and massively mischaracterize a situation to downplay the very awful things that people did to Aaron and instead place more of the blame on him. We saw the same shit happen constantly with Julian Assange.
The post isn't downplaying the things that people did to Aaron though?
Most of us are here anonymously, no? Personally, I choose to trust that my fellow HNers are (by and large) real people speaking in good faith. Otherwise, I'm wasting my time reading any comment thread here at all.
RE: I was not in a position to help him address his mental health,...
I just had a friend commit suicide last week and have been feeling the same, if only I was there. Another friend (a mental health nurse) shared this:
"Fortunately or unfortunately I don't think we can hold ourselves responsible responsible for the decisions of others"
Can you give any more details ? I've never heard about this but sad if true
There is a great documentary about him (The Internets Own Boy) and a book (The Idealist)
What does his sexuality have to do with any of the points raised by OP?
It's some context about his struggles.
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This really isn’t the tone you should adopt on this forum
His profile says he wrote for Wired, so I'm inclined to cut him some slack. He spent 4,000 words and six Pantone colors talking about SMS for logins, but never found time to write that powerful, 40 year old men were flying a 14 year old around the country without his parents present, so maybe not.
Sickly Jewish kid has his childhood stolen, gets radicalized, hangs himself is a much more painful story to read. More importantly, it demands actual answers. No wonder it never got told. It's not exactly Brighton Beach Memoirs.
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 filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.
> trespassed into a room
A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/.
> rotated his MAC address
Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.
I'm not sure if this is meant as some kind of "gotcha," but the legal system doesn't work that way. He wasn't rotating his MAC address as a default practice. He changed the last byte of his MAC only when he noticed he was banned from the network.
Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did.
All of this is in the indictment, which is worth reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...
Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today.
From your sourced link.
> JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal.
If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law?
It was free for MIT students but paid for everyone else, I believe. That's why he needed to jack into MIT's network.
JSTOR was free for the public as well, but had a per-day download cap, which IIRC was 3 papers.
You are greatly underestimating what was going on.
Over the course of months they tried all kinds of blocking methods that would stop most people, but he kept evading them. It is impossible that he did not know his use of the free access was no longer authorized.
Then he put his equipment on their wired network, which he had no permission to do so and had to trespass to do that. It is irrelevant that the door was unlocked and in a hallway the public could get to. It being unmarked just makes it worse, since doors the public is supposed to use generally are marked.
He also repeatedly came back to that room to check his equipment.
He was now grabbing data at such a high rate that JSTOR cut off all MIT JSTOR access for a few days while they tried to figure out what do next.
At that point MIT research is being disrupted. MIT does a lot of government research and what was going on was indistinguishable at that point from a hostile attack, and police were called.
Were those hackers MIT students? Was Aaron?
Both Aaron and "those hackers" were MIT community members.
That's an interesting spin that means precisely nothing. I'm not authorized to enter facilities or building maintenance spaces in buildings in my town because I'm a "community member".
The general public was authorized to enter the facilities 24/7. The exterior doors were unlocked and it was considered an "open campus". The access controls you see today have only existed since COVID. Whether he was a student at the time also means "precisely nothing".
Really? The expectation was that they could go into facilities closets and plug into the core networking equipment?
Don't waste your time arguing with people like this. They can't admit the nuance of the situation: what Aaron did was blatantly wrong, and what the government did in response was disproportionate. They will only focus on the latter, and make endless irrational justifications for the former.
The expectation is that MIT doesn't go to the police when someone plugs a computer into a switch in an effectively unlocked data closet.
The expectation is that such individual and laptop doing "unauthorized" scraping doesn't trigger a criminal investigation when the host university, and the target business, didn't implement any meaningful access controls or even rate limiting for any other person on campus.
The expectation is that after an investigation of scraping at 11 req/s (450,000 over 11 hours according to the report), a further 8,000 requests (before JSTOR blocked MIT's /8) two weeks later would not have the effect that "Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide." The expectation based on that claim by JSTOR is that JSTOR was incompetent or lying.
The expectation is that when MIT was able and willing to implement access control for JSTOR, and JSTOR declined because they want to develop a notice to MIT visitors who might be negatively affected by ending uncredentialed access, JSTOR would not then create a tempest in a teapot over the violator returning and continuing to download papers at a reduced speed that wasn't even detected for about a month. On Dec 26, when JSTOR again noticed the "abuse", they went to significant effort to route the violator's requests to a special server and serve them garbage instead of the real PDFs, all on short notice... yet they couldn't add the general notice to MIT visitors about the credentials requirement, on a much less urgent timescale; they had told MIT in October that they needed until after Dec 18th to add such a message. The expectation is that JSTOR's claims are self-serving lies.
The expectation is that such a request pattern would not trigger a report, by the MIT libraries director, to the MIT academic council, that a "cyberattack" had been launched from MIT's network.
The expectation is that you don't get arrested for felony B&E for entering a data closet that's effectively unlocked, connecting to a switch, and scraping a paper hosting site that offers free downloads from the entire institutional network.
The expectation is that you don't get charged with larceny for downloading, in any quantity, papers that are freely available to anyone on the MIT campus or probably most other campuses in the U.S.
The expectation is that sending web requests with a url parameter indicating T&C has been agreed to, and without saving cookies, might be a basis for a civil action, but is not "accessing a computer without authorization" under the CFAA.
The entire situation, at most, should've been a minor local crime and a lawsuit by JSTOR against Swartz. Yet the state charges were dropped (feds didn't want to share required discovery material), and JSTOR settled with Swartz before the feds even indicted.
MIT was caught in an awkward position of having the ability to block unauthenticated scraping to protect their contract with and access to JSTOR, but not doing so. So they proceeded to treat someone connecting to a switch in a data closet and doing what any MIT visitor could do, as a criminal offense.
I don't believe anyone at MIT was genuinely concerned that there was some broader criminal conspiracy when the issue was downloading of papers from JSTOR. Certainly not based on some random Chinese IP pinging or scanning Swartz's laptop. When the data closet laptop was discovered in January, MIT could have left a note telling the owner that JSTOR is very upset and it would be better for everyone if the scraping stopped. Why didn't they? They could even, reasonably, have taken the laptop and external drive and noted that the data closet was insecure and please contact network staff to claim it.
Yes, he did that. He also settled the problem with jstor, returned the files as part of a civil settlement.
This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy.
MIT was another affected party, who reached out to the government for help.
Please sir, we lost entire megabytes of bandwidth as someone accessed free resources on the internet, we are such an aggreieved party.
Amusing, but a long string of rogue cyber intrusions coupled with Jstor blocking MIT altogether a few times isn’t something to ignore. Hard to imagine just ignoring the risks and potential of that unknown.
MIT and Jstor had a bunch of incident response going on, and it isn’t a leap to consider Jstor would cut them off for good if the situation went unresolved.
Why do you seem so desperate to characterize Aaron as some amoral super-spy hacker? His ethics are well known. He took issue with Jstor's business model of gatekeeping tax-payer-funded research behind another pay wall, stole some articles, got caught, settled with jstor and MIT. Life could have gone on.
The OP's blog post is about how the law isn't applied equally in the United States. Aaron was an individual and an easy target for the overzealous prosecutor. Meta's a faceless corporation, guilty in the court of public opinion, and they don't even get a timely investigation because they have the money to tie up the broken legal system indefinitely.
Aaron was an example - if you're small enough, you will be caught, tried, and punished in whatever way we see fit to prove that the justice system "works". If you're a billionaire, do whatever you want wink wink.
There are two entirely different issues:
1. Is the law aligned with moral and ethical expectations? Probably not.
2. Is the process reliable? At least since the Derek Chauvin trials, I'm having doubts, but it doesn't seem it had failed in this case.
Sure, cases of the former need urgent fixing (and we're not getting that), but the latter scenario falls into the "The end is nigh" category.
Wasn’t Meta found to be scraping from addresses that were not immediately traceable back to them?
Maybe, but the prosecution that most people would say lead to his decision to end his life was from abuse of the MIT network over months until they had him on video.
The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue.
To me his crime is the equivalent of sneaking into a public library with a photocopier and copying down books without having a library card. It is not and should not be that serious. Is it annoying? Yes. Should he have gotten in a bit of trouble? Sure. But nothing like what he was charged with or dealt with. They hammered down serious law on this guy for what should of at worse been a petty crime.
So what crime was he guilty of that Meta isn't? "Scraping too unsophisticatedly?"
Physical trespassing (as far as we know), but they’ve certainly done all of the rest millions of times.
Thank you. It's absurd that we are comparing breaking into MIT and (physically) breaking into a network with scraping the web and scanning physical books.
The core argument makes a lot more sense when you compare Aaron’s pirating via network closet with Meta’s pirating via BitTorrent.
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 land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.
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...
Why is that fundamentally different?
And that warrants a 7-8 years sentence, without a plea? Maybe in a police state.
> repeatedly broke in to a room
> rotated his MAC address
Do you really think these details drastically change how people should judge his actions vs those of a corporation?
Yeah, intent matters. Evading security matters. It's a big point that his actions were intentional and not passive or accidental - not that IP infringement by corporations isn't its own discussion.
How is Meta using BitTorrent to download over 80 terabytes of copyrighted books while avoiding using corporate IP addresses not evading security?
Torrents are openly accessible, even if .gov might enable infringement claims by the rights-holder. They're not hacking into networks.
Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult.
The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT.
Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail.
> Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult.
To borrow your words, intent matters.
Also why are we acting as if Meta wasn’t doing this for over half a decade and that companies don’t actively take steps to try and prevent piracy?
Sure intent matters but I still don't see how this warrants the government going after him.
MIT called up the government and said there's this guy. Whether they should have is debatable, but they did.
No, but they do drastically change how people should judge his actions vs someone who simply downloaded some documents that were served on an open web server. OP didn't say "it's ok if a corporation does that", he said that Aaron's actions were more serious than people commonly make them out to be.
Information should be free.
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.
JSTOR didn't own the copyright to any of the material, so could only serve it under the license agreements it had. Nevertheless they were able to arrange for their license to allow over 10000 schools, libraries, and other institutions to provide free access to walk-in users.
A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
> they were able to arrange for their license to allow over 10000 schools, libraries, and other institutions to provide free access to walk-in users.
Sure, but that still only covers a miniscule fraction of US taxpayers. Plus, you have to walk in to the school, library, or other institution, instead of just being able to use your web browser at home.
> A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
This is a genuine value add, but it could have been paid for by the government directly without then having the material behind a paywall.
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.
>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.
I think a better analogy for this situation is: The public donates food, then the recipient, after being fed, sells access to (infinite cheaply replicable copies of) said food for a profit. The public in this case just wants to have said food.
Maybe we are better off avoiding the analogies.
The public gives them cash for terms of a grant. If those dont include an open access paper, it is unreasonable to demand it after the fact. It certainly doesn't give a right to go take take their papers (or whatever they made).
> 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.
It seems like you are jumping between the reality you would like and the reality that exists.
It is fine to want for something to be different, but that doesn't change the facts of how they are.
It's fine to advocate future papers be made public. I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. The word for this is expostfacto recontracting, and undermines just about any system of law where is used.
Last, there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Free public access is often the least of those concerns. Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.
To understand this better, consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding. The government might rightly calculate that it is in the public interest too help a for-profit company develop a cancer cure with grants, then have no cure at all.
> 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 reading comprehension.
> The word for this is expostfacto recontracting
No, the word for what you're doing is putting words in my mouth and attacking a straw man.
> there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public.
Can you give some?
> Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.
Which they then have to pay fees to, using more of our tax dollars, because of the sweetheart deals the government has given the journals.
Not only that, but researchers nowadays share copies of papers over the Internet routinely (for example, using sites like arxiv.org), so they don't even need journals to know what other researchers are doing. So even that rationale for paying the journals is now out of date.
> consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding
A patent requires revealing the information that the invention is based on, in exchange for the exclusive right to produce the item for some period of time. So I don't see how this is an argument for keeping publicly funded research behind a paywall.
> 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 work on your reading comprehension.
rude...
> Can you give some?
I gave a few. The government may want the technology in production and dont care at all about any public disclosure. all the researchers they care about will have journal access either way.
One I didn't mention is that researchers want the freedom to publish as they choose. The government is happy to trade this away as part of the grant process.
The point I was trying to illustrate is that there is no reason to think open access is a non-negotiable or top priority from the government (or public good) perspective. All things being equal, it is nice to have.
> 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.
Surely it depends on the specific information in question?
What's the point of statements so broad and ambiguous that they seem to disregard any kind of context or nuance? Do you really believe that _Information_ should be free? Which one? All of it?
“People who generate valuable information should be uncompensated”
You say this like it's related to the parent quote. We could absolutely compensate people and not charge for information. It's not that hard to imagine that we could feed, house, care for, and provide a small stipend to authors, artists, etc. and also make their work output free to everyone who wants it.
Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
How much money do you think the scientists who wrote the papers are getting from the access fees? (Hint: it’s the only number that stays the same when you multiply it by sometting.)
The scientists who wrote the papers that Swartz downloaded were compensated, with the public's tax dollars. That should mean that we the public should now have free access to what we paid for. Unfortunately the government prefers to let private companies keep those papers behind paywalls.
JSTOR isn't just full of publicly funded work.
> 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.
I don't think it matters much for the argument, which is valid (or not) regardless of whether you get the precise facts about the Swartz prosecution right, but Swartz was not facing 35 years. That's the statutory maximum sentence you'd get if you ignored the sentencing guidelines and grouped none of the charges, which is not how anything works. The prosecutors threatening Swartz and his attorneys claimed they'd pursue something like 7 years. But Swartz's own (well regarded, well qualified) attorney, writing after his death, when there was ample reason to take shots at the prosecution, believed that even had Swartz lost the case, he'd be unlikely to receive a custodial sentence.
I bristle as well when essays like this state that he "was effectively assassinated by our legal system"
While I think there are a lot of good arguments that the prosecution was excessive and meant to create a chilling effect, it is a huge leap to say they assassinated him. He was clearly already vulnerable when this happened, or he would have never resorted to taking his own life when there were still so many avenues before him to try to get out of the situation. While this does not make it any less tragic, it does make it a lot less of an 'assassination'.
I don't find it rhetorically useful to use language like that in these situations. It distracts from the real issues at hand.
It's completely illegitimate to say he was "assassinated". Words mean things, and unless the government sent someone who personally killed Aaron, it wasn't an assassination. That doesn't mean what happened to him was right. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't care about the situation. But one doesn't get to misuse a word where it doesn't apply just to make a rhetorical flourish.
How many days have you spent in jail or prison? I've done two, and it was weird coming out to freedom. Actual thought taking some of my first steps: "wait, if I want to be over there, I can just start walking?" The guards and fellow jailers were all quite reasonable, too.
I can barely imagine facing a whole year. I can't imagine facing five.
If there is a point to be made from what you're talking about, it's about how threats of inhumane prison sentences are used to eliminate our right to trial by jury.
One of the reasons so many people believe Swartz faced 35 years in prison is that any attempt to correct the record is met by responses like this. Ironically, you're doing the work of the prosecutors for them: this is the whole reason they quote these outlandish and implausible sentencing possibilities in their press releases.
By "responses like this" do you mean any form of criticism? What I am calling out is your purely positive statement that lacks any sort of normative judgement. It's the type of thing which helps normalize the status quo, regardless of whether the cudgel is 35 or 7 years.
Here is a comment that makes a similar point to yours, but in a constructive manner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992
Also, Aaron was pals with some of the brightest people in tech and law. I have a hard time imagining that they didn't try to ease his stress by pointing out that 35 was just the typical bluster.
I recently came to the conclusion that it was never about copyright. It's about corporate control, about punishing contempt for business model.
Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. All the kids sued by the MAFIAA were punished because they disrespected a business model. Copyright was merely the mechanism to make it stick. But AI companies and Meta can disrespect copyright all they want, because in their case, it serves a corporate business model, and those hurt or disenfranchised by it are regular people or much smaller companies.
The law doesn't exist to protect the weak from the powerful, but to enable the powerful to punish the weak.
This is pretty close. They attacked the business model, which was an attack on the law itself, which was an attack on the civil structure, which was an attack on everyone who benefits from it.
Lots of people have a vested interest in civil structure, from the poor to the rich. Everyone would be worse off if the US looked like Haiti.
That said, people benefit in different amounts from the system at Large, and lose or benefit from Individual policies
What do you think copyright is in service of? It doesn’t exist for its own sake.
It provides a legal justification for censorship. Originally used by The Church to prevent the wrong sort of bible from being printed. It has always been about insulating monopolists and gatekeepers against change.
We desperately need to find better ways to pay creators, and it's good that they've managed to put copyright law to some non-nefarious use towards that end. But they deserve something that actually meets their needs, which copyright law does not.
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...
You confuse words with outcomes. The fact that they say that that's the intent, doesn't mean that it's always the outcome. Copyright offers the most protection if you've got the funds to litigate. The government isn't going to do it for you. And copyright has absolutely been used to stifle the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public.
> Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model.
Exactly. And what's more, it's a business model, keeping behind paywalls scientific papers that we the public have already paid for once with our tax dollars, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
The attorneys who did this were Carmen Ortiz, Stephen P. Heymann, and Scott Garland. To their everlasting shame.
Aaron Swartz's most famous book recommendation, in a now 20 years old blogpost ( http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/epiphany ), Chomsky's Understanding Power, contains many examples of such cases of those in power, big corporations and the government getting away with crimes. I should probably reread it, even though it can be depressing - but not quite as depressing as Manufacturing Consent.
RIP Aaron.
The best state of affairs is that neither Aaron nor Meta nor anyone else should be targeted for scraping. It shouldn't be a crime. I understand the ire about the injustice, but I don't think the right situation is that because Aaron's case was wrongly pursued, we should somehow enforce that error in the name of consistency.
Swartz was federally charged with wire fraud and violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act based on allegedly unauthorized access, not simply prosecuted for copyright infringement or “downloading articles.” Also, he was offered a plea deal of 6 months and his own attorneys did not expect him to serve any time even if rejecting the plea deal and convicted.
Meta is accused of civil copyright infringement.
Very different things.
And, I feel like people really gloss over, perhaps because it is uncomfortable to think about...
He took his own life.
There is no doubt the government put him in an uncomfortable position, but his story is a gross and tragic outlier. It's hard to draw any patterned conclusions from it, especially because we'll never know how the case would have worked out had Swartz not exited the judicial process.
Aaron had a history of depression and suicidal ideation that long predates his prosecution.
Also: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsk...
He did. But it in no way excuses the way they treated him
He was treated poorly. But somehow a lot of otherwise-smart people think you should not charge a person who suffers from depression or suicidal thoughts.
"You are hereby charged with the offence of rape. How do you wish to plead?"
"I am sad"
"Okay, you are free to go"
As someone, who was wrongly accused of a crime, and had to go to court over it. I can relate, I was massively suicidal, made a whole plan and stockpiled what was required to do it. I was having vivid dreams of even more extreme ways I could go about it.
As you can tell that never happened, but at the same time I always argue in comment sections over his case, as people so wildly misrepresent what happened to their own gains. Especially the fact he willingly and continuingly went around blockers put in place to stop the activity from happening, even after being caught.
Meta should absolutely be routinely charged for violations of CFAA given the things they do. Zuckerberg personally.
So since we're all talking about him I just noticed something odd on his old website. If you go to the full archive of his posts (which seems to be sorted by date) and scroll all the way down to the oldest post there is one at the very bottom that is a bit odd with grammar and was posted in April 2012 - specifically not organised by date like the rest.
Link to the full archive:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fullarchive
Link to the out of order post:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/parpolity
The US has normalized so much moral rot and legal breaches in the past few years, all in the interest of making more money... Rarely does a country degrade so much, so fast, and I'm afraid this isn't even the low mark.
It hasn't degraded in such a short time, this rot has been there for 30 odd years. Infrasture, systemic corruption to an unprecedented level (it's always there, but the scale is different), etc.
What happened 'so fast' was how fast they pulled off the mask. 10 years and it's practically off in its entirety...
> 'How did you go bankrupt?' Bill asked.
> 'Two ways', Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly'.
As someone who was around during Reagan, you are correct. The turn happened in the 80s, and then rapidly accelerated in the 90s and 2000s, then rapidly accelerated again in the past 10 years.
I think a lot of folks are stuck on the idea that it's been a singular bad actor -- a Trump, or a McConnell or something. This "Great Man Theory" is almost certainly a very naive read of the systems that are leading to this moment.
Fall of the Roman Empire took hundreds of years and long tomes have been written about it.
In this case it looks like there would not be enough material even for a thin paperback.
The real shame is that the next "best" countries are.. China? and the European countries pushing for age verification and sweeping surveillance and apparently bent on destroying the freedoms that made them better than China & Russia..
God can we have an alien invasion already please
>God can we have an alien invasion already please
I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end.
As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a case exist.
"there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end"
OK doomer
Age verification isn’t moral rot even if you disagree with it. The rot is the obvious corruption and legal system that only applies to average people which billionaires constantly violate.
China?
Not sure if Chinese propaganda got you or what.
They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.
The United States kills 4 of their own people and the news outlets go wild.
> They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.
lmao have you realized how absurd such numbers are (even though I'd assume the 100,000,000 can only be a hyperbole, or are you actually serious with it? Having a single child policy for a long while is not the same as "forced abortion" if that's what you're referring to. The thing called "contraceptives" exists) if you use your common sense for just a second?
Seems that it's you who got fed a lot of propaganda unfortunately.
And yes there have been a lot of disasters throughout the history, even not so long ago (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc.), but if you're suggesting that's what the current regime is doing in 2026, you have no clue.
https://www.wired.com/2009/10/swartz-fbi/
It's possible the JSTOR charges were in some way motivated by the earlier PACER incident
In the JSTOR case he installed a python script on his own laptop, connected it to MIT's network and left the script running for months
In the PACER case, the computer he used did not belong to him. It was a government computer in a federal building primarily used by lawyers. He installed a perl script on the government's computer and left it running for weeks
It does not appear he ever asked anyone for permission to do this
It's surprising he avoided CFAA charges for the PACER incident
Did he exceed authorized access to a "protected computer"
For purposes of the CFAA it does not matter if the documents were public information
Perhaps there are libraries that welcome patrons installing scripts on their publicly accessible computers without permission, then leaving the scripts running on their networks, downloading 1000's of documents
Maybe MIT would not care. But there is every reason to believe the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals would care
This is not to suggest he deserved his fate, only that the PACER incident mattered. Perhaps more than the JSTOR one
The blog author does not mention it
A key aspect folks should understand about US Copyright Law is that it much more severely penalizes infringement with distributing, or an intent to distribute, unauthorized copies than to just consume privately. Distributing unauthorized copies is a federal crime (which can escalate to a felony based on various factors) whereas doing whatever for private use is usually a much milder civil liability.
If you look at all the much publicized piracy trials around the Napster era, they invariably came down to the defendant distributing the works they downloaded.
This explains why the AI giants are legally fine doing what they're doing. They are explicitly not distributing copies of the work they acquired (although Meta apparently torrented some stuff, which seeds i.e. distributes data by default, and so might be in trouble to that extent) and training AI has so far been ruled to be fair use. Which, technically, makes sense; encoding patterns gleaned from billions of texts into weights is clearly different from distributing exact copies, and if you look at the cases where LLMs can be made to regurgitate content verbatim, it only really works for a handful of extremely popular books.
This also explains how whatever happened with Aaron Swartz, as tragic as it was, is qualitatively different from what is happening with LLMs. He very explicitly scraped all that content with the specific intention of distributing it. On the other hand, AI companies are literally destroying mountains of books to comply with the law.
You could call this tragic on multiple levels, but not hypocritical.
A German publisher is currently sueing OpenAI, because they think it is distributing unauthorized copies of its work. [1] It's in German, but I think the example picture speaks for itself. So essentially big tech is doing exactly what the torrenters were persecuted for. I still think big tech will be treated differently.
[1] - https://www.heise.de/news/Rechtsverletzende-Kopien-vom-NEINh...
You can read it in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Rights-infringing-copies-of-NEI...
Hmm, not familiar with what's happening in Germany or its copyright laws, but I do recall coming across this piece of news, where OpenAI was indeed found guilty of infringement, so I don't think Big Tech is being treated differently: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/11/chatgpt-v...
> Distributing unauthorized is a federal crime
Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call.
Aaron Swartz was the victim of a witch hunt, plain and simple. The prosecutor that came after him (Carmen Ortiz) has never suffered any negative consequences for coming after him in such an injust way. She should.
> Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call.
I don't think it's a judgment call, the level to escalate seems to be pretty specific and at an extremely low scale, specifically unauthorized distribution "of at least 10 copies OR 1 or more copyrighted works with a retail value > $2,500" and the penalties are pretty severe, including imprisonment for "up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both."
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
I'd say Aaron Swartz had crossed that bar pretty thoroughly.
arguing that the application of the law was as expected to people who point out how unjust the expected application of the law is is pointless.
ideally, we would see a stronger legal reaction to the biggest IP heist in history but clearly it's not what's happening. it's only natural for people to criticize the current system until a change for the better materializes, while doing so draw attention to extreme cases such as Aaron's.
But my point it is not an unjust application of the law, the law is specifically structured to treat certain behaviors as worse than others. IMO that is actually fair in theory: We do NOT want to punish people who casually pirate stuff for private use, but we probably do want to punish and deter bad actors who want to profit off of the work of others'.
Aaron Swartz's case was actually neither -- you could say he wanted to "liberate" information for the "public good" -- but unfortunately the law has no provision for that and all his actions were consistent with how the law specifies the bad actor case, which is what escalated things drastically.
In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far, but I honestly wish these could be used to prosecute people who are treated differently for the same crime because of their status, or at least set a precedent that such activities are definitively okay.
> In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far
This is what happens when they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
> Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides.
Hundreds of innocent people went to prison, were financially ruined, thirteen took their own life, because a well-funded entity found it easier to privately prosecute its contractors than to question its software vendor. And the court system let them do it.
For some insane reason I am unable to comprehend, the UK government still allows Fujitsu to bid on government software contracts, despite being responsible for all of the false imprisonments, trauma, and tragedy you laid you in your post.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-govern...
I have a feeling Fujitsu took the blame for mistakes done by the Post Office in order to get future contracts. The contracts are padded to pay fines and damages.
I understand the government would have difficulty excluding Fujitsu under its own procurement regulations at the time (Public Contracts Regulations 2015). Fujitsu voluntarily withdrew its bids in 2024. The goverment passed the Procurement Act 2023 which came into force in February 2025 and there is now a national debarment list, though I note Fujitsu isn't on it.
Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its own subpostmasters.
Some US states still have private criminal prosecutions.
> Second, this Article demonstrates that the government monopoly on prosecution is an ideology rather than a rule. As it turns out, the government has never had total control over criminal law enforcement—not even exclusive authority to charge someone with a crime. While some courts prohibited private prosecution in the nineteenth century, others refused to abolish the practice. Public prosecutions of felonies and federal offenses became the norm in the progressive era, but private prosecution persisted in various forms. Particularly in “lowly” municipal courts, private individuals retained the ability to file and litigate criminal cases.
-- The Past and Persistence of Private Prosecution, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5210126
Some areas of the USA still allow it too, but it's rare.
In Australia at least, the Director of Public Prosecutions has the power to take over the matter, and they often do.
They can then do one of two things. They can either continue running it if it’s in the interests of justice to do so (public interest, reasonable prospects of success etc), or they can shut it down, as they tend to do for sovereign citizen nonsense and the like.
Same in the UK
In England, private prosecutions are used regularly by the railway. The threat of prosecution lets them do a shakedown to extract sums from people
It was less bizarre when they were all private companies, but now many are owned by the government!
Some of them have successfully prosecuted people over a £0 difference in fare
> 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.
Aaron's case was wrong, but we shouldn't turn coats about "information wants to be free" just because it's gaining more momentum?
It would be petty and counterproductive to do it just for consistency of enforcing the wrongness.
There's a Chinese saying from more than 2000 years ago: When one steals a weapon, they are executed; when one steals a country, they become a king.
How the world has always worked, sadly, ha.
This is really a problem with companies vs. individuals breaking laws in general. There is a perverse incentive for prosecutors to not go after companies unless they have an airtight case because a company will be able to afford to defend themselves with an army of lawyers and even if they cannot win they will drag out the case. Meanwhile individuals can be pressured into accepting a plea deal with much flimsier evidence because the potential consequences can be life altering.
I think it's self-evident that that every legal system is both imperfect and unevenly-applied, being a finite resource. It's also a self-evidence truth that money & power buy resistance to the the legal system.
It's hard to put a definition on "unfair", but we all recognise it when we see it. That's why the case of Aaron Swartz is so very visceral for most of us.
Weird implication in the headline. The conclusion here isn't that scraping is bad, but that Aaron Swartz was unfairly prosecuted.
I get the sentiment "Aaron paid while Meta and its likes are getting away", but what will we gain by getting them to pay pennies? We still can't do what Meta is doing, legally, that is the problem
We need to repeal anti-circumvention laws, and yes, it means we might legally be able to do to Meta and its likes what they've been doing to all of us
The legal system and government these days are mostly tools for oppression of the working class. Most people would be better off without any laws at all and just talking things out with their neighbours, employers and employees; refusing any form of unearned trust or authority.
Democracy doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately; nobody has any ideas who they're voting for... Photos can be faked, videos can be faked, candidates can be pre-selected during primaries. Worse than that; each individual is shown different facts so nobody even agrees on the basic facts. So literally people are voting for constructed, imaginary individuals who don't exist outside of their heads. Also, there are too many people voting for too few representatives. This guarantees poor representation.
The legal system should be replaced by some kind of vigilante justice hybrid like in the old Roman system were people would be exonerated for taking revenge on just grounds. It's impossible for the legal system to be fair anyway. The closest to justice we can achieve is through decentralization.
IMO, the role of government is to dismantle any large organisations which compete against it for power and control and shield individuals against those organisations.
Arguments exist about how intellectual property needs to go anyway, but FB has always stolen from people, on many levels
And furthermore their trackers have always been the most malignant. Stories of "Facebook basically ddosed my site to train their LLMs"
Calling him "effectively assassinated" is ridiculous.
He was offered a plea deal of 6 months in jail. Which he turned down. And then he killed himself - something which he attempted multiple times in the past when he wasn't being prosecuted for anything
Carmen Ortiz should have been disbarred over this, it was a shameful episode. Instead she retained her position for years and now is presumably quite wealthy as partner in a prominent Boston law firm.
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.
Because he planned to make the data public, Meta just wants to use it to enrich its shareholders. See also: Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and every other big player in this space besides.
There’s also the fact that Swartz was physically trespassing and attaching unauthorized machines into networking closets to run scraping on a university network to exfiltrate the scrapes to the public, versus just scraping public facing web from the public web to train a model. That’s a little different and while the feds were heavy-handed against Swartz these computer crime laws were well known and it was less heavy handed than the hacker crackdowns of the 90s if you want to look at precedents.
Meta has opened sourced almost all of their models trained on this data.
But not the training data.
Not sure what your point is - the articles they trained on are copyrighted and not theirs to open source. The only they can legally open source is the weights, which they have done repeatedly.
My point is both Aaron was trying to make the journals public and Meta made models that encapsulate data from the journals public.
With added filters (censorship)
This bothers me big time. One my forums got hit by 200k to 280k requests over a 15 minute interval multiple days. I ended up just blocking the whole range /16
vaguely related I was thinking of yet another irony
where the orange infant calls datacenters "beautiful" and now is arranging to give them federal land to build on to get around all the protests
while at the same time calling solar and wind turbines ugly and loud and giving billions to companies already contracted to NOT build them
it's all the irony of wild greed and infinite corruption, if only Aaron could have seen this future
It’s not even greed or corruption – it’s mental illness.
Calling it an illness takes away his responsibility while he's very much aware
sadly none of those are mutually exclusive
“ The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” is a must watch documentary.
I didn't know Aaron personally but went to his memorial at Cooper Union. I went because I thought he was one of us.
RIP Aaron.
Oh is's never about who did what, it's about who considers whom worth suing at a convenient point in time.
BTW Uber broke many laws to kill taxi small business and they got away with it as well.
What's the point of having democracy when it's working only for the rich?
Because it's preferable to what happens when the body politic decides they've had enough, particularly in the US.
do we have a better understanding of mental health on this forum now to both acknowledge the overzealous nature of the prosecution and also view Aaron’s life ending choice as an individual one
most people do the time
He fought for free internet. Today both sides are all trying to kill it.
US gov even threatens foreign govs for punishing rough american companies.
"Rule of the law" is just a lame excuse to "the job of a lawyer is to sell privileges to rich people".
In some countries the excuse is lamer than in others. But, in the end, everywhere in the world money always speaks louder.
Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.
USA never was a democracy, same as many other countries, including UK.
These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now.
Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1.
It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.
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 would make in a couple months for selling user data and whatnot.
This is something that every company gets away with mainly I think because of just how large their wealth actually is. It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. Punishing an individual is easy.
I don’t know if there’s really a solution at this point, maybe we could’ve prevented this reality at some point in the past but I don’t think that without actual global collapse it would be something that can be retroactively changed, and I don’t know if global collapse would necessarily lead to a better future.
I think that for one, Zuckerberg should be in prison, if someone oversees a massive theft like this, I think they should be held criminally liable. Same the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI for their parts in the massive theft that took place. They should all be doing prison time.
The reason I don’t think they will is that their investors probably have a good amount of leverage over anyone who would prosecute them, so it would never make it that far.
> 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.
> and like I already said punishment is hard specifically because how do you fine someone with infinite money?
This isn't true though, if they had infinite money they wouldn't be spending every single second of their waking existence trying to get more of it and move higher on the leaderboard. If your opinion is that Meta/Zuck wouldn't care about being fined a year's worth of global revenue, or in his personal case, 90% of his net worth, then I'd really like to hear why. Because it contradicts all of their actual actions showing that all they care about is hoarding as much money as possible, meaning they'd very much care about it being taken away. Maybe I'm missing something.
ZUCK: PUBLIC ENEMY # 1
I mean, total societal collapse would absolutely suck, and there's indeed no guarantee that whatever will replace it won't fall into similar traps eventually, but if things actually are as you describe them, it only can get worse and worse indefinitely, until we get to global collapse anyway.
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.
its really sad and doesn't even make much sense, and thats from me just following the story loosely from the uk over the years.
The US vs Swartz case was abusive prosecution; lawfare in other words. It was completely out of order with the level of offense.
98% of the commenters here have no idea what Swartz was actually charged with, or what he actually did. Here are a couple of articles that cover this from an expert in the relevant areas of law [1] [2].
Also, due to the very stupid way the DoJ calculates potential sentences in their press releases, almost everyone thinks defendants are facing much more prison time than they actually have any remotely realistic chance of receiving. Here's an article on that [3].
Briefly, if some hypothetical criminal committed some specific crime in the worst way possible, hitting many of the checkmarks that make it worse (such underage victim, victim is a law or government official or relative of one, victim was restrained, hate crime, terrorism, organized crime was involved, they were a manager or supervisor in that organized crime, they abuse a position of trust, they used a minor to help with the crime, they used threats to impede the investigation, they committed reckless endangerment while fleeing arrest, and the crime was committed while they were out on bond or bail from another federal crime) and could get a sentence of N years then N years is what the DoJ states in the press release.
Doesn't matter that the actual person being charged has none of those, or that they have some of the circumstances that can lower sentences (such as acceptance of responsibility, only minor involvement, helped investigating or prosecuting another person, diminished capacity, they self reported their crime before authorities discover it, they were coerced into participating, and some more) and there's basically no chance they will get anything more than maybe a few months of parole...it is going to say N years in the press releases.
Actually, it might even say some multiple of N, because they often charge the person with multiple things based on the same underlying harm. For example if you kill one person that might be first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter.
They might charge you with all of those (which does make sense--they are going to try to prove all the elements of first degree murder, but if they fail to prove of them they might still prove the elements of one of the others). If the jury comes back and convicts on several of them all but the most severe one will be used for sentencing. But the DoJ press release will probable make it sounds like you could serve N years for each of them.
It's completely ridiculous. They have the details of what they are charging the person with. They know about all those factors that increase or decrease sentences. They could do the math and give a realistic sentence in the press release.
[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
Class justice in optima forma
If you cut down a couple acres of forest you own because you want to have a hay field or whatever you're <screech> violating federal environmental law <screech>
But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things on their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local commissioner.
What happened to Aaron Swartz is little different.
Remember Aaron Swartz !
what's the point here? a wrong thing happening to Aaron doesn't mean we should make that same thing happen to Meta
It seems to be how people view things, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. It's like the outrage when wealthy people get off on charges. Usually it is because they have the resources to demand the justice that should be afforded to everyone. You shouldn't be outraged at the privileged being treated fairly. You should be outraged at the many many instances of the unprivileged being treated unfairly.
Rather than making others suffer to balance things out, removing suffering on the other side has the same effect.
...and still fails to win the ai race at least for now
Too small to scrap (c)
Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).
rules are there to serve power
One of the reasons big companies still get away on things like these is because fines are pocket change to them and top level executives ever face a real prison sentence at all.
They have already done the legal work and the math in advance, and because the numbers are on their side they get away with it.
Is as simple as that.
“Laws are spider webs through which the big flies pass and the little ones get caught.”
― Honore de Balzac
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TLDR - the rich get unequal treatment.
LOL. If justice is blind then why do some lawyers charge so much more than other lawyers?
Because they smell really nice?
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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.
No complaints from me about for profit insurance companies withholding treatment. They are doing the Lord’s work. We need them. Stephen Helmsley deserves more than $61 million a year.
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When a corporation commmits murder it’s good business. When an individual commits murder it’s horrendous.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pprpd3x96o
https://amazonwatch.org/news/2024/0214-chevrons-environmenta...
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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.
Believe what?
It's the truth of the situation, it's reality.
brand new account and all that...
Aren’t the two cases fundamentally different?
If you’re going to leave a comment like this you need to at least outline your thinking as to why you feel they’re different.
not the OP but the heaviest charges against Swartz didn't stem from his IP infringement, it was wire fraud and computer fraud. He used a network access and MIT guest account he didn't have legal access to because he wasn't affiliated with the institution, which enabled the CFAA charges.
Expecting the prosecution for HuggingFace incident soon. Or at least full investigation whether it was accident
Must be any day now
Like common. You know full well that large companies can commit staggering amounts of fraud.
Is HuggingFace reaching out to the FBI for assistance to prosecute OpenAI?
What does the claim that large companies can commit large frauds have to do with anything?
Ok and so what? We have been informed of an injustice, we are now angry. Now what? What do we want? Do we agree that the prosecution was unjust and wrong, celebrate that Meta is not being criminally prosecuted, lash out at the publishers filing the lawsuit and advocate for an official apology from the prosecutors and government that went after Aaron?
Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”?
Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?
I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no?
As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produced by corporate social media explains both its attraction and its resilience in the face of more democratic and emancipatory alternatives.
> I think the point is to make corporate decision-makers bear some personal responsibility for the consequences of decisions made in pursuit of profit, growth or dominance. If all the upside is personal or corporate while the legal and social costs are simply externalised, there is very little incentive for restraint, no?
But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him?
We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".
Worth noting: this website is not one such alternative.
>we're talking 35 years in prison, $1million USD fine, and asset forfeiture
This is not true. From the prosecutor's testimony:
Aaron broke into a room to setup the system to do the scraping.
Much different than scraping web content from the Internet.
It's also weirdly interesting how people defend Swartz activities, while calling on other people (or corporations) doing it to be prosecuted.