Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Aaron Swartz, co-creator of RSS, faced up to 35 years in prison for downloading 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR, while Meta torrented over 80 terabytes of books to train AI models with little consequence, the author argues. The post contrasts Swartz's prosecution with Meta's alleged copyright infringement, highlighting a double standard in how the legal system treats individuals versus corporations.
Swartz' use case was the dissemination and archival of knowledge; Meta's use case is powering up their proprietary plagiarism code that cooks the environment while giving CEO's psychosis and making one of the world's richest people even richer.