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.
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 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
« selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir »
"The laws on little culprits fall;/ Great criminals escape them all."
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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The real issue is that in the US, everything is for sale.
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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.
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> 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_...
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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?
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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.
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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
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the government is made up of the people. the people are mostly greedy because our culture worships wealth. broken people, broken culture, broken government.
Luigi Mangione
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.
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
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> 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
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
And that warrants a 7-8 years sentence, without a plea? Maybe in a police state.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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”
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> 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
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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.
Aaron had a history of depression and suicidal ideation that long predates his prosecution.
Also: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsk...
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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.
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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.
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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...
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...
You can read it in English: https://www.heise.de/en/news/Rights-infringing-copies-of-NEI...
> 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.
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
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...
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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
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
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
« selon que vous serez puissant ou misérable, les jugements de cour vous rendront blanc ou noir » "The laws on little culprits fall;/ Great criminals escape them all."
Nothing new since 1678 it seems
> 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.
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
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"
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.
Meta has opened sourced almost all of their models trained on this data.
But not the training data.
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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 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.
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.
“ The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” is a must watch documentary.
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.
US gov even threatens foreign govs for punishing rough american companies.
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.
"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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Too small to scrap (c)
Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).
...and still fails to win the ai race at least for now
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.
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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...
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.
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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.