1212
Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
(blog.curiousquail.com)
Yeah, but he wasn't a billionaire.
this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2026
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When a regular person murders someone - life in prison.
When We Love Genocide LLC murders 12 families - $3.43 fine.
Yes but Aaron made the rookie mistake of not being a multibillionaire with a whole building of lawyers to fight on his behalf.
When you're famous they let you do it
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.
one only has to look at the health insurance industry to see how deadly that is both for claimants and ceo's alike.
Because Swartz didn't have a legion of expensive lawyers at his disposal. ☹️
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
And was murdered by the US government.
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.
expensive lawyers
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?
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:
- the data harvesting is automated
- the data you harvest is not owned by you, and you don't have explicit permission to use it
- the scope of what you harvest is broad and not targeted at retrieving specific limited pieces of data
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 Swartz was ~~prosecuted~~ murdered for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Fuck what they did to that guy. We should have revolted then.
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
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.
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"
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.
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