6 ms·

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

by ipython 5mo ago

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!

alex1138 5mo ago
Had Aaron copied Snapchat 5 times the DOJ would've been fine with it all. His fault for not having the foresight
- alex1138 4mo ago
  (I'm being sarcastic. Zuck gets rewarded for continually copying Snapchat features into his products)
Melatonic 4mo ago
Truly ahead of his time
lesuorac 4mo ago
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 ...
- alex1138 4mo ago
  And also I think MIT didn't defend Aaron but maybe I'm wrong about that
- qingcharles 4mo ago
  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.
zajio1am 4mo ago
Well, Meta also shared their AI models freely with world
- bamboozled 4mo ago
  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.
defen 4mo ago
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.
- platevoltage 4mo ago
  They should make another one of those PSAs. "You wouldn't steal 10,000,000 cars".
spongebobstoes 4mo ago
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
- ipython 4mo ago
  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.
  - spongebobstoes 4mo ago
    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
    - ipython 4mo ago
      Technically he wasn’t charged with any copyright violations. See indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states-of-america-v-aaron-swartz/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...
    - jmye 4mo ago
      [flagged]
      - stevenhuang 4mo ago
        Social norms and laws influence each other but often it is norms that change first, then laws change. Once a technology becomes massively useful and socially normalized, it is our legal systems that adapt around the new reality. You can make the bet copyright laws won't change in the future but it's one you'd likely lose. For one, laws would probably be weakened to allow/look the other way for "wanton" training with copyrighted works for one simple reason: governments are unlikely to go for strict copyright maximalism because that would permanently cripple domestic AI development.
TiredOfLife 4mo ago
> 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.

by ipython 5mo ago

alex1138 5mo ago

Had Aaron copied Snapchat 5 times the DOJ would've been fine with it all. His fault for not having the foresight

alex1138 4mo ago
(I'm being sarcastic. Zuck gets rewarded for continually copying Snapchat features into his products)

Melatonic 4mo ago

Truly ahead of his time

lesuorac 4mo ago

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 ...

alex1138 4mo ago
And also I think MIT didn't defend Aaron but maybe I'm wrong about that
qingcharles 4mo ago
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.

zajio1am 4mo ago

Well, Meta also shared their AI models freely with world

bamboozled 4mo ago
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.

defen 4mo ago

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.

platevoltage 4mo ago
They should make another one of those PSAs. "You wouldn't steal 10,000,000 cars".

spongebobstoes 4mo ago

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

ipython 4mo ago
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.
- spongebobstoes 4mo ago
  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
  - ipython 4mo ago
    Technically he wasn’t charged with any copyright violations. See indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states-of-america-v-aaron-swartz/ https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...
  - jmye 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - stevenhuang 4mo ago
      Social norms and laws influence each other but often it is norms that change first, then laws change. Once a technology becomes massively useful and socially normalized, it is our legal systems that adapt around the new reality. You can make the bet copyright laws won't change in the future but it's one you'd likely lose. For one, laws would probably be weakened to allow/look the other way for "wanton" training with copyrighted works for one simple reason: governments are unlikely to go for strict copyright maximalism because that would permanently cripple domestic AI development.

TiredOfLife 4mo ago

> 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.