Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
quailblog
I'm Upset Again About a Co-Creator of RSS Being Prosecuted For Something Meta Is Doing With Little Consequence
Also here's a cool unrelated photo of a chipmunk because I need some chill
Because Swartz didn’t have a legion of expensive lawyers at his disposal. ☹️
And was murdered by the US government.
Because Swartz was merely a natural person, while Meta is an almighty corporation. Everybody knows only corporations deserve rights, duh!
the profits have spoken
Goddamn, that’s good
Because Swartz wanted a free and open web and the powers that be wanted control over every major social media website. This was around the same that moot showed up in Epstein’s emails and would later sell his site. All in the run up to the 2016 election. Now think about how /r/thedonald stayed on the site for so long.
r/donald was a py-op posing as social media. I doubt it did much other than get liberals mad on reddit but it was clearly a sign of things to come.
Fox is the true evil.
Lol, doesn’t matter if you have expensive lawyers. What matters is that you have counsel that goes to church with the judge or plays golf at the country club with them, or knows people that do. Or you’re a Zionists genocide supporter and pedophile like Alan Dershowitz.
Obligatory FUCK SPEZ
RIP Aaron.
Fuck Congress and the DoJ as well. How the fuck can Reddit still have Section 230 protections after what spez did?
Fuck what they did to that guy. We should have revolted then.
[deleted]
Democracy was always a mirage, it was only for rich white guys in the beginning, not the enslaved Africans and genocided natives. We’ve found ways around giving liberty to at least some portion of people continuously since.
More like we’ve known, but it’s been more tolerable until recently. We got frog boiled, and are just realizing we’re cooked.
Moral of the story never do anything as an individual by your name. Do it as a multi-billion dollar company with a battalion of lawyers and have fall guys. At minimum have an LLC controlled by a trust in someone else’s name doing anything actionable in court.
Remember companies are people even though they can’t get arrested and giving large sums of money to politicians is free speech, not bribery or corruption.
And do it in a large enough quantity that it makes financially insensitive to do it at a large scale vs small
In short just add lots of people and many steps in the way. Killing someone is bad, releasing a product / service you know will kill lots of people is just a rounding error in business.
So scraping means any harvesting of data now?
We need a new name for the fairly painful process of trying to tease meaning out of people’s unstructured HTML.
In any case downloading a bunch of stuff from JSTOR was not scraping. And he absolutely had authorised access to that data. They took exception to the quantity, mainly.
Scraping has multiple meanings.
Web scraping is a specific type of scraping, but data via APIs or even torrents could be considered a scrape, even if that data is nicely structured.
The commonality between them is they all have the implication that:
Any access patterns that broadly correspond to this could be considered scraping.
Sure. Fine. It means all of that now.
But what are we going to call the difficult thing that we have to do to coax, say, unstructured event listings into reasonably structured data?
If you want to refer specifically to web scraping then call it “web scraping” or “site scraping” or “HTML scraping”
Not difficult to get your meaning across.
Also that he was planning, or already was, sharing the data for free. They made an example out of him because he believed such data should be for everybody.
Aaron is definately on my wall of heroes. I think much of our leadership does not understand how despite there being billions of people on the planet they are not just fungible commodities. That we lose every time and stunt our growth. I by no means mean we should have more populationa as what we have is to much for the biosphere. Its about smartly using what we have than thinking you can just replace a person with another.
The anti-piracy efforts of the RIAA and MPAA (and the publishing houses and…) are still pretty robust, but that didn’t stop any of the big AI companies from using gigatons of copyrighted material as datasets to train their LLMs. It’s why when you ask them to generate an image featuring Winnie The Pooh, they all know what you’re talking about.
But the big companies absolutely did not get permission to do this. Nor did anyone give permission to allow for the recent jailbreaks by AI task systems to hack into other companies. If that were any singular human (not of the owner class) they’d face charges under the CFAA. But since it’s a massive company with an army of blue-haired lawyers, nothing was done about it, and the companies actually bragged about their AIs escaping containment.
Extinction by AI takeover is far more interesting than extinction by global drought.
If only we could figure out the difference between these two things, we could learn so much! Alas, it is unknowable.
When a regular person murders someone - life in prison.
When We Love Genocide LLC murders 12 families - $3.43 fine.
Did he pay a fee to the king and visit his inauguration like Zucker?
He (who founded and stood behind the original concept of Reddit) was so forcefully charged that he decided to commit suicide because he believed that information deserves to be free.
About a year ago I saw coverage on IA getting reamed for the cases they were dealing with, there were many takes during then and it turned out the way it did (and continues to) but my take on it basically extends from what the govt did to Swartz, in that IA had to deal with all of that almost entirely on their own and take on the mental turmoil, meanwhile Meta et al not only got away and continues to get away with it but in fact are now partnering up with other mega corps doing the same shit, for profit. It dead set almost feels like they’re mocking us by going this far with these ventures, they’re like “Yeah the govt moralized and killed someone for the same shit we’re getting govt contracts for and ADVERTISING ON OUR OWN PLATFORMS, gonna do something about it? Mad?”.
All of this amounts to the most open and shut case of “if you have enough money, you can get away with anything”
When you’re famous they let you do it
Obviously fuck Meta, but the difference is the publishing. Scraping and copying for personal or business use is a civil matter. And machine learning from unlicensed material is also fine - as long as the material isn’t “memorized” and an AI model can’t reproduce it.
Aaron bravely published the papers which is a criminal matter. That is why I believe copyright and IP law is the real theft, they take down copies for people to learn from.
There are many many millions of people who read and learned from pirated textbooks and who use those skills to do things. Who watched pirated amines or comics use that to learn how to draw.
Basically we should not be siding with the unethical side of IP law just to oppose AI corporations. They can afford to buy the books and media, and a simple purchase will do. And they can afford the lawsuits. And they will figure out the memorization problem, so that AI models learn but not memorize (which is only happens in like 1% of the cases and only when you specifically ask for something “just like that”).
China (so far) is saying that the AI models they produce should be open weight and be available to all people on earth. So if we have any issues it should be with the monopolization of AI models that concentrate this new developing immense power of AI in the hands of a few plutocrats. Which the IP laws might actually help them with.
He didn’t publish them, as far as I know. The charges brought against him were centered around the allegedly “fraudulent” use of his JSTOR account and the fact that he downloaded the files from the premises of an institution he did not belong to by plugging his laptop in a network switch in a restricted area where he wasn’t allowed to be. The actual deed was minor, likely not even criminal as far as digital rights were concerned, and the charges were famously so out of proportion that even other attorneys and legal scholars questioned them publicly. The publishers wanted to make an example, and it drove Swartz into suicide before a proper trial could be held.
Meta and other companies do essentially the same thing at a much larger scale and with the clear intent to monetize it through publishing AI models built on top of it all. The main difference is the legal climate, which has changed since/due to Swartz, and the lack of clarity that the law has for these new applications. Substantively though, there is a good bit of hypocrisy here, and it makes sense to point this out.
I don’t think he did.
I thought that was where a bunch of the initial core of libgen/anna’s archive was from? Maybe I’m wrong
Why not? There is nothing ethical under capitalism. The system is literally destroying the planet. Normal people need to use whatever tools they can just to have a chance.
Lets say IP law is extended or reinterpreted to include that machine learning from book or papers or articles or comments requires a special license, even assuming the memorization problem is solved. This is what anti ai seems to be arguing.
This would then result in some kind of “deal”. Producers of AI models are required to pay some kind of overall license fee or percentage into some kind of public fund. Even Bernie Sanders suggested something like that. The problems I see:
Also in combination with advances in robotics, these AI models could do a lot to allow people to become “independent” by just telling your $6000 robot (actual price for a humanoid robot in china today) to plant some potatoes and vegetables there there and there, then clean the house etc. Or DIY build your own out of plywood, servos and a smartphone once technology advances.
This happened with the tobacco funds when vaping came around. Governments had leveraged the future payouts of these funds with banks for short term payouts and would have been in big trouble if vaping actually reduced smoking significantly.
Yeah, but he wasn’t a billionaire.
Not sure if we’re saying harvesting data is good or bad…
Stealing is bad but we celebrate Robin Hood because he stole from the corrupt and gave to the needy
And women used to be burned at the stake because society didn’t like them, now they just get paid lower wages. It’s called progress…
Edit: I guess we aren’t doing dark sarcasm in the classroom today, huh?
Aaron was not charged with scraping public servers, he was charged with unauthorized access. He “hacked” the server. Meta just scraped publicly accessible information.
Let’s be clear about this: Aaron absolutely had authorized access.
I’m on Aaron’s side, but didn’t he break into a network closet and patch directly into their servers?
It’s splitting hairs but the law treats breaking and entering very differently than remote access. When I went to school, I had a job on campus but I’m sure the University would have considered it illegal if I broke into the utility closet of the building I worked in.
No. He placed a computer in a unlocked network closet and used that to download a bunch of data from JSTOR (which he had acces to, and a lot of the data is public domain anyways) and kinda-sorta caused DDoS attack against the service. Prosecution then slapped him with a shitload of federal charges which (in my opinion) were largely at least massively exaggerated if not straight made up. Threat of 50 year jail sentence and million(s) in fines then pushed him to take his own life.
Wikipedia has pretty detailed info about him and the whole case.
If you want to be clear, you should provide some sort of explanation and evidence.
Bruh, can you lick metas boots any harder? There’s so many examples of them using unauthorized access even long before llm’s were a thing…but even if that wasn’t the case, they just fucking bragged about their “ai” hacking other companies. Stop spreading lies for the billionaires, it’s pathetic.
Take it easy. artyom might just be mistaken you don’t need to turn it into a class war.
At this point it already has been turned into a class war. They get away with so many crimes and just a slap on the wrist. If an individual does it life sentences. Almost like the laws are made to be broken by the rich.
I’m not pretending there isn’t a class war. That would be silly of me.
When people start acting like the class war is happening right here between their fellow fedi citizens, that’s when it becomes a bit unhinged.
Between equals it’s not a class war though, it’s infighting. And agreed, we should avoid that. Rich parasites love to see us divided.
[deleted]
I am not “licking boots”, I am discussing facts. And I’m gonna keep doing it.
Sure, there’s an endless list of awful things they’ve done, but that’s not what’s being discussed here.
I’m not talking about random awful things they’ve done I’m talking specifically about unauthorized access issues which is literally what you named as being the difference. Get some reading comprehension.
But he did have access via university. Besides, my understanding is he was scraping research journals, many of which would not have been possible without grants from tax dollars. Meaning the mere fact that the research is publicly funded means the journals should also be public.But they didn’t even prove he distributed them. For all we know, he was planning to have an AI use them for training and apparently that isn’t a problem.
You do realize as well that almost every site you visit makes API requests. And you can then use the same API to request other data directly. And the difference between “public” and unauthorized access often comes down to whether you used the same API that your browser would call, but instead decided to make other calls to it directly.
Like with command line tools? But that’d be hacking! Egads!
Is it a B&E if the door is wide open…or would that just be an ‘E’?
If you let your neighbor walk in to your house as he pleases…can you get mad at him if he walks in like Cosmo Kramer while you’re shagging your wife? Assuming you’re not into that, of course.
What if he had noble intents…like he heard the moans and thought you were at work and he was about to break up an affair or stop a rape or have some leftovers?
No, a much better comparison is that his backyard is already wide open. Whenever you go there he takes you all around his backyard. There are no signs saying you shouldn’t go to certain parts or fences stopping you. You go there to look at other parts and he still takes you there. Then one day he gets mad and says he himself took you to a part of his backyard that he didn’t want to, and rather than put up a better fence, he’s going to have you arrested for trespassing with multiple felonies… no warning, straight to prison!
[deleted]