Comment by int32_64
7 hours ago
Aaron Swartz was facing up to 35 years for wire fraud and hacking for swiping some JSTOR documents, and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.
7 hours ago
Aaron Swartz was facing up to 35 years for wire fraud and hacking for swiping some JSTOR documents, and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.
Because that's not what IP law is for. IP law was always corporate rent-seeking. None of those arguments about fairly compensating people for their creations or preserving the profit motive were ever being made in good faith. The point was always to force you to pay for something that would be free under natural laws. And I do mean you specifically, because the act of copying information freely was always going to be preserved for them.
Swartz was charged under the CFAA, like most hacking cases, and it clearly applies to the Anthropic and OpenAI cases.
It's not the IP law alone that's the problem, it's the way the legislative and justice systems work. There will always be a law and an interpretation that favor people who can afford to buy them at the cost of those who can't.
>and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.
For good reason. Courts have so far ruled AI training is fair use, and it doesn't look likely to be overturned by the supreme court. Theres also the matter of some labs pirating books to get training data, which is illegal (they lost in civil court), but it's unclear whether that can be criminally prosecuted.
Courts have also ruled that sharing in P2P network is enough to get hit with 150k in statutory damages per shared work.
AI companies did quite a bit of uploading while e.g. getting Anna's archive over BitTorrent.
It's transformative. Not aimed at exact reproduction, so not in the scope of copyright law.
8 replies →
Hacking other companies is illegal as far as I understand.
1. OP specifically mentioned "IP violating antics", not hacking
2. All the hacking legislation (and criminal law in general) require proving intent, which so far as we can tell didn't exist in those cases. At best you can try some "reckless" or "negligent" angle, but that would a novel legal argument and would be risky to prosecute
3 replies →
Okay, and? If anything, the Swartz case was even more direct fair use. There's very little to use JSTOR for which isn't some form of teaching, scholarship, or research!
Clearly the fact that the end-use is (possibly) fair use isn't the only thing that matters.
It wouldn't be ruled fair use in a sane society without bribery and lobbying with competent technologically savvy law interpreters.
Meanwhile, in China they got the best video models cause they don't care much about IP. The irony that China, by being a threat, is preventing the west from lurching toward totalitarian is really interesting.
It's not at all relevant to this thread, but no he wasn't. At their worst, prosecutors were threatening to push for 7 years; the guideline sentence for Swartz's offense, were he to take it to trial and lose, would likely have been under the level allowing for straight probation (go to a sentencing calculator and plug the values in); writing after his death, his own lawyer stated that had he gone to trial and lost he was unlikely to face a custodial sentence at all.
We get this "35 year" number from adding up all the counts he faced, taking their maximum sentence. That's just not how sentencing works. Like charges group, and you're sentenced according to the most severe charge.
People cite these numbers in part because DOJ posts them in their press releases. DOJ is in these instances lying. When we amplify those lies, we're doing their work for them.
This is 100% correct.
Here are some useful links. This is an explanation of just how they got those ridiculous numbers like 35 years [1].
There is also often confusion of what he did and what hewas charged with. Here's a two part series going over that [2][3].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
> People cite these numbers in part because DOJ posts them in their press releases. DOJ is in these instances lying. When we amplify those lies, we're doing their work for them.
If DOJ said to him or to the public potential punishment is 35 years, then yes it is fair to say he was facing that. They cant have it both ways - claim that 35 years is possible outcome to pressure the person and then turn around and be like "nah, that is exaggerated such huge penalties are not a thing".
Seriously, it is 35 years when it suits DOJ and institutions. And it turns into "likely just straight probation" when ... suits DOJ and big companies.
The obligatory:
“The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have
the just’s umbrellas.”
Aaron Swartz was not charged for violating IP either.
So you are for shutting down xcancel?
Michel Foucault enters the chat.
I've read a fair amount of Foucault and while I could guess, what specifically were you thinking of?
Aaron sees safety in sharing, interests see threats in the shared, governence see threats in the sharing.