Comment by arionhardison

>> A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is repealed and no one can be charged with it anymore.

This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.

"If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged"

It's unlikely people would have enough evidence of high enough quality to make that case. The prosecution will just say the evidence isn't enough.

I think part of the balance is that law requires discretion because humans are not good at making deny lists which the law boils down to.

In fact most people are okay with selectively stretching time limits and elevating a low class misdemeanor into a felony in order to prosecute someone where the party who would be the injured party said there was no injury.

And lest people think this is a one way street, each side thinks the other deserves interpreting the law to “get the real baddies.”

Our system has that built in. You can only be punished as to the norm and standards, findings can create precedent for other cases, etc. The workaround is they just use an 'as applied standard' so that it only can 'apply' to the one case due to that case's unique 'circumstances'. They do it all the time to prevent precedents from being set. 'As applied' rules are excluded from setting precedent.

As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to prevent establishing legal norms from judicial findings the way our system is supposed to.

> If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down

I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.

Careful there, you're attempting to introduce elements of reason and justice into law. When has that ever worked?

“For my friends, everything. For my enemies, the law.”

The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides

Maybe from here: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/12517091-conservatism-consi...

Finland links speeding fines to income. I'd like to see something that get far broader application. That prevents the wealthy or huge corporations from seeing lawbreaking as a business cost, without destroying a small business or individual who commits the same crime.

Perfect may not be possible but with AI society will be able to scale law enforcement to way more than what a few individual officers can handle.

[dead]

>It all started going downhill once they started calling corporations "legal persons" and gave them all the same right as people, but

The 1860s?

Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?

This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.

>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't

Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...

But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.

The point here is that as you stated: "you still do not understand". For those of us that have been under the thumb of the judicial system it can feel like the world is on you. We have no idea of his mental state, we have no idea of the nuance or motivation but what I do think we know is that the actions of the state here far exceeded any interpretation of what would be deemed an appropriate punishment for the said "crime" committed. What we do understand is that if he hand not been attacked by an over-zealous prosecutor there is a far greater probability he would have been able to handle the situation in a logical manner and maybe even still be here today to defend himself.

We are not asserting that any specific outcome is empirically superior to another just that given the facts of the case, it was not adjudicated fairy given what we know of similar cases.

>How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs

Knowledge is power.

Hi @dang, the reason I've flagged this account is not this comment itself, but the extremely suspicious account with the same creation date that posted vile abuse to arionhardison.

How would it help the world for Aaron Swartz to download 3.5 million research and primary source PDFs?

Example 1: antibiotic and antiviral production technology for developing countries. Even if we limit ourselves to out-of-patent molecules, the primary literature describing the discovery, production, modification and testing of life-saving antibiotics was, at the time of Aaron Swartz, largely hidden behind strict paywalls that typically were accessed through a university library subscription. Access to all that information allows countries and institutions with very limited resources to set up generic medical production pipelines for life-saving medications they couldn’t afford to import - or to become international market competitors to established interests.

Again, that’s just restricting the argument to out-of-patent products that can be generically manufactured with no legal issues. What about life-saving but patented products that are too expensive for poor countries and regions to buy on the open market? Does that added-value IP charge justify unnecessary deaths in such cases?

And about that IP - the vast majority of paywalled research literature was produced with taxpayer funds delivered via government funding agencies, and there’s a very good legal argument that this alone puts it into the public domain. If private companies want to set up Bell Labs 2.0 with no government funding and patent everything they discover, that’s their own capex risk, but just hovering around and scooping up publicly funded discoveries via exclusive licensing deals with universities and researchers makes no sense - instead, patents should be available to any citizen of the government that put up the funds, and research papers should be available to anyone.

As far as the argument that widespread distribution of the knowledge to produce antibiotic, antiviral, and other complex biomolecular products represents a biological weapons risk? Notably that’s why no LLM provider service will help develop technical protocols for antibiotics production, or insulin, or anything similar - claimed dual-use risk fears. This conveniently slows the rise of legitimate independent competition in the pharmaceutical sector, which helps if the goal is maximizing profit margins via monopoly power. Bioweapons production realistically requires nation-state or large-corporation scale resources, and the solution is not obfuscation of basic knowledge but rather international treaties, select agent rules, laboratory operation and equipment purchase licensing requirements, etc.

That’s just one sector - there are at least a dozen other examples besides biomolecular drugs of ‘how it would help the world’ to make all published research literature available to anyone with a network connection, ask any LLM to enumerate them.

The trouble with lawyers is that their quality varies tremendously but the client has very little ability to tell the difference until after it's too late.

In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.

And that's another advantage corporations have over individuals. If you break the law at scale you can afford to retain lawyers and evaluate them based on past performance.

I can attest to this.

My duty solicitor on the day of my arrest kept making comment that he believed I committed the accused offence (I didn't). Mostly because he didn't understand it it, so that's proof enough it seems.

He then sent me a letter outlining what he understood, which outright stated he believed I did it (again, I didn't). Dropped him like a hot stone when I got charged, and paid for my own. Who after some research was actually half-good.

Then the barrister I had at trial said "You'll likely go down, the judge you have is a bastard, and has sent a lot down", great..

And now when I'm trying to get some reconciliation for all this nonsense. The legal firm I hired to sue, are ignoring my instructions and went for something entirely different and offering a whopping £1000 compensation.

My legal costs alone were many times that

My implication wasn't that there'd be "low level" corruption of that nature, but that there's "high level" corruption in both instances; The direction to prosecute Aaron Swartz, and not investigate Meta, are both driven by an interest of the State to protect large enterprises, rather than citizens.

If we consider campaign financing and lobbying, I don't think it's a stretch to believe that almost any outcome can be bought in the US if there's enough money involved.

> The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.

That's the racket. Getting any jailtime for "mass downloading" is a severe penalty, but that gets turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.

> maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied

and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case.

If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get it, but that's far from the case.

I don't think the issue is the time in prison.

I think it is the criminal record. Other places in the world, once you've served your time you can often go right back to living. Not that it is easy but it doesn't hang over you.

In the US, once you have a criminal record - any criminal record - there are flow on effects that keep fucking with you for life.

He'd been caught once already, then continued and went around ever barrier they put in place to try and stop him.

The con is largely directed at the religious right, of which, poorer whites make up the largest cohort. That's how they convinced people directly targeted by the bigotry to still vote for them.

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

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