Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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

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