Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it).
But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!
One man illegally downloading copyrighted material is a crime. Multinational corporations illegally downloading copyrighted material is the only remaining growth area in the US economy and vital to national security.
They should make another one of those PSAs. "You wouldn't steal 10,000,000 cars".
And Jstor dropped the lawsuit when Aaron deleted his local copy. DOJ didn't drop theirs.
I doubt Meta has deleted their local copy though ...
It's absolutely unthinkable that Meta and friends aren't still using a corpus containing the entirety of every book they can obtain. There is no way they're building frontier LLMs without it. You can be sure as hell the Chinese are doing it, so the US corps are absolutely still doing it.
And also I think MIT didn't defend Aaron but maybe I'm wrong about that
Aaron Swartz was treated unjustly because copyright sucks. we should oppose such laws and treatment, not wield them as retributive tools against our opponents
it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures
It would be easier to advocate for the reform of those laws if they were actually applied evenly.
I’m not calling for its use as a “retributive tool”. Just that it be applied evenly.
advocating for more punishment under copyright law is directly opposed to reform or removal of the laws
court precedent is a useful tool of advocacy
Technically he wasn’t charged with any copyright violations. See indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...
What an asinine argument. Advocating for enforcement of existing laws is advocating for enforcement of existing laws. That’s it. Good god.
> not wield them as retributive tools against our opponents
No, we should apply them equally to Mark Fucking Zuckerberg (which is decidedly not retributive, however much you want to make an emotional appeal) until such time as they are repealed as laws. It’s not really that complicated.
Truly ahead of his time
Well, Meta also shared their AI models freely with world
They released products for free use, they didn't release the code of those models for free. Which IMO would make some of what they did here right.
Had Aaron copied Snapchat 5 times the DOJ would've been fine with it all. His fault for not having the foresight
(I'm being sarcastic. Zuck gets rewarded for continually copying Snapchat features into his products)
> Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life.
According to comments here that was totally deserved. You should not mess with copyright.