Re: Aaron Swartz
 

does he do anything with it? if not, probably he just stole from the band. maybe the bar.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

Oh I agree, but the animal people who disrupt laboratories have similar sort of idealistic notions about what they're doing. I happen to agree with a lot of what Aaron was being civily discourteous (to use the expert's term) about than the animal rights people.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

The USA seemed to think so.

Eta. Read that wrong. Does it matter? Didnt seem to for Swartz.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

Noted.

Whatever.

So?

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

Do the animal folks do it through cyber space?

My bet is, most of them, if they are disrupting a lab, are pretty clearly trespassing, because labs do things like lock doors, and may be breaking and entering, and may be damaging property - all good, healthy state law issues that will get them an unpleasant time with the cops and some punishment from a judge.

I don't know that I'd advocate much more for them; calling secret service or FBI seems excessive. Probably if they were letting exotic diseases out of the lab we'd want those guys, but not if they are just liberating some cancerous mice.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

Well, value, which you question for the articles, is usually set by what people that don't own the goods or service would pay for it. The fact that you wouldn't pay for it doesn't mean it has no value, especially if others do pay for it. Look at ebay for god's sakes.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

I didn't question that the articles have value, I questioned your statement about what they're worth. People can get those articles for free, so they are unwilling to pay for them. Universities have a different arrangement with JSTOR, but I don't see how that's relevant to anything.

As I said before, so? You seem to be trolling, taking the position that Swartz got what he deserved from the US Attorney's office in Boston, perhaps since everyone else here feels otherwise, and so you're saying maximalist things to provoke. What do you really think?

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

I think you can be a dick. I have not written that many posts here on this issue. I said I take no position on the decision to push towards trial, and his defenses may well have not truly been evaluated prior to the suicide. Then I said what he did was not trivial. Do you have blacked out portions on your computer screen or are they in your brain?

allegory-
 

When Ty was just a little boy (Ty @ 5) he went into a small store with his father. The shop had a "take a penny, leave a penny" jar. Just before the two Slothrop's had walked in a customer had left a pocketful of pennies, around 50 cents. Lil' Ty asked, "daddy can I take these 50 pennies? I mean the sign says they are free for the taking." The father knew he should explain to Ty that the sign said "take A penny, not 50", but he was distracted by an issue at work and didn't take advantage of the teaching moment. Ty took the $.5 and has never looked back. It was all free!!!!


edit- or better, the father did tell him. Ty then walked in and out 50 times.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

Jstor apparently feels it is trivial. If the information were creating a revenue stream consistent with the USA's assertions, nobody in his right mind would give it away for free. Which is exactly what Jstor just recently did.

Regarding $5,000 being a threshold for felonies, well, the reason for that is simple. Got to hang a felony on the kids selling drugs because without that, they aren't barred from carrying guns. And that felon-with-a-gun charge (read about it) is where you get to put them away in jail for a long time, and make some asshole on Wall Street who finances or covers our private prison system a chunk of change he can spend on coke and weed.

Circle of life, eh? The poor kid with no choice but to engage in the victimless crime of selling a substance to people who knowingly choose to ingest it gets to provide some shithead sociopath not only with his weekend drug cache, but also, via the dealer's inevitable incarceration, helps to fund that asshole's bonus.

Think I'm kidding? I have an investment paper from a bank in my computer touting just how "lucrative" the prison system will become over the next twenty years.

This is the shithole we live in today. Again, I hold no gripe with a man doing some rotten shit to get paid. But if you're going to be a fuck, admit it. If you're profiting from a dirty system and someone calls you out on it, don't pretend otherwise. Admit you're an opportunist. Have some decency. This country's filled with ten million or so too many people who only avoid the word "criminal" by grace of perverted laws, enacted by whores. And in almost every instance, these animated vomit stains are the first to hold themselves out as pillars of virtue. While a kid who actually invented something useful gets the boot of the system across his windpipe.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

Obviously, I've been thinking about this episode too much.

But my conclusion after much back and forth is that this whole case rested on the word "unauthorized", a very difficult concept to apply to open, welcoming folks like MIT and JSTOR. Because they are so open, there are ways Aaron was more of a bad houseguest than anything else, and there are defenses against every argument he violated the contracts.

I argue about words like "unauthorized" all the time. But we argue about it between two parties with relatively equal downsides: we are both spending time and money and have something of value at risk, whether money or intellectual property or other asseets of some sort. We usually come to reasonable conclusions and litigation is only occassionally needed to resolve disputes.

In this case, Aaron had his life at risk, and had already lost most of his fortune defending that, and the AUSA had a modest portion of his worktime at risk. That is what warps the playing field and why criminalizing what is basically a contract violation distorts justice.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

from what Less posted: "JSTOR is an organization that sells universities, libraries, and publishers access to a database of over 1,000 academic journals. For a large research unversity, JSTOR charges as much as $50,000 a year for an annual subscription fee, at least parts of which go to pay copyright fees to the owners of the articles in the databases. The JSTOR database is not freely available: Normally, a username and password are required to access it. But if you access the site from a computer network owned by a university that has purchased a subscription, you can access the site without a username and password from their network. Users of the service then have to agree to use JSTOR in a particular way when they log in to the site; they generally can download one article at a time, but the JSTOR software is configured to block efforts to download large groups of articles."

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

FYI, he only downloaded one article at a time. He just wrote a script to do that continuously. That's why it was running for months.

The software was not designed to block that approach, or to otherwise limit total numbers of articles downloaded one at a time.

All reasons JSTOR settled early and asked that criminial charges not be pressed. They had better things to do.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

sure, and it asking that the charges be dropped, and the gov not dropping them, is troubling.

Re: Aaron Swartz
 

Perhaps they just bought a new car.