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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
"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).
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.
>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.
> 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).
"...there's no way a group of billionaires can control the Politburo, as billionaires control American policy making. So in China, you have a vibrant market economy but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, the interest of capital and capital itself has risen above the American nation. Political authority cannot check the power of capital. That's why America is capitalist country, but China is not." [1]
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.
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.
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.
Agreed, to an extent, but that doesn't mean you can breach any barrier someone has in place preventing access, take it, and make it publicly available.
The information Swartz was downloading was scientific papers that we, the public, have already paid for with our tax dollars. The crime here is that the government allows JSTOR and other private companies to still hold those papers behind paywalls instead of releasing them into the public domain as they should have been.
Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.
The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.
Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
> Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.
Um, what? So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research are public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding.
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.
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!
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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? I was merely calling out your positive statement that lacks any sort of normative judgement. It's the type of thing which helps normalize the status quo.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
B2B crime ought to be handled in a gentlemanly way through litigation. C2B crime deserves the full weight of the law and prison consequences. United Health killing people by denying coverage for care is OK. Luigi killing one of the executives is not.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
>> 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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".
I suppose in pleasing the right people with money and power.
Easy notch on her belt.
Aarons lawyers expected an acquittal which is why he rejected the plea deal of 6 months
"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.
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).
That’s infuriating.
JSTOR dropped civil litigation only after getting about $25k in the settlement from him.
It was Carmen Ortiz, not abstract "US Government".
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.
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.
>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.
Is that not how it always goes? Robbing a bank got you in jail a lot longer than assaulting a woman.
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.
> 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).
"...there's no way a group of billionaires can control the Politburo, as billionaires control American policy making. So in China, you have a vibrant market economy but capital does not rise above political authority. Capital does not have enshrined rights. In America, the interest of capital and capital itself has risen above the American nation. Political authority cannot check the power of capital. That's why America is capitalist country, but China is not." [1]
[1] https://xcancel.com/thouse_opinions/status/15380991993586851...
Luigi Mangione
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why is that fundamentally different?
> 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.
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.
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.
Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.
The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.
Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
> Doesn't matter if the public funded it. The public didn't mandate or pay for the publication rights or access.
Um, what? So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research are public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding.
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.
“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!
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
> I don't like talking about this
I can see why it's difficult, but I think your post provides some much-needed context.
Can you give any more details ? I've never heard about this but sad if true
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.
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? I was merely calling out your positive statement that lacks any sort of normative judgement. It's the type of thing which helps normalize the status quo.
Here is a comment that makes a similar point to yours, but in a constructive manner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992
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.
> 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.
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
The attorneys who did this were Carmen Ortiz, Stephen P. Heymann, and Scott Garland. To their everlasting shame.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Remember Aaron Swartz !
Oh is's never about who did what, it's about who considers whom worth suing at a convenient point in time.
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?
US gov even threatens foreign govs for punishing rough american companies.
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.
Meta should absolutely be routinely charged for violations of CFAA given the things they do. Zuckerberg personally.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
>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.
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.
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"
What's the point of having democracy when it's working only for the rich?
Class justice in optima forma
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.
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.
"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.
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
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.
sadly none of those are mutually exclusive
Too small to scrap (c)
Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).
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?
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.
The US vs Swartz case was abusive prosecution; lawfare in other words. It was completely out of order with the level of offense.
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.
Worth noting: this website is not one such alternative.
B2B crime ought to be handled in a gentlemanly way through litigation. C2B crime deserves the full weight of the law and prison consequences. United Health killing people by denying coverage for care is OK. Luigi killing one of the executives is not.
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.
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.
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.