Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

The part that still bothers me so much about the US vs Swartz case is that JSTOR didn't pursue civil litigation against Aaron. It was the US government that pursued him.

There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).

Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.

The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.

RIP Aaron.

The attorneys who did this were Carmen Ortiz, Stephen P. Heymann, and Scott Garland. To their everlasting shame.

The US has normalized so much moral rot and legal breaches in the past few years, all in the interest of making more money... Rarely does a country degrade so much, so fast, and I'm afraid this isn't even the low mark.

In Commonwealth countries, it's possible to initiate a private prosecution (by a person who hasn't received criminal justice). These don't usually get very far, but I honestly wish these could be used to prosecute people who are treated differently for the same crime because of their status, or at least set a precedent that such activities are definitively okay.

its really sad and doesn't even make much sense, and thats from me just following the story loosely from the uk over the years.

Class justice in optima forma

Too small to scrap (c)

Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).

Everyone is under the illusion that the US is still a democracy. It is not. It is a plutocracy. The rich control everything and the rest are modern day serfs.

vaguely related I was thinking of yet another irony

where the orange infant calls datacenters "beautiful" and now is arranging to give them federal land to build on to get around all the protests

while at the same time calling solar and wind turbines ugly and loud and giving billions to companies already contracted to NOT build them

it's all the irony of wild greed and infinite corruption, if only Aaron could have seen this future

If you cut down a couple acres of forest you own because you want to have a hay field or whatever you're <screech> violating federal environmental law <screech>

But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things o their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local comissioer.

This really is no differennt.

B2B crime ought to be handled in a gentlemanly way through litigation. C2B crime deserves the full weight of the law and prison consequences. United Health killing people by denying coverage for care is OK. Luigi killing one of the executives is not.

Ok and so what? We have been informed of an injustice, we are now angry. Now what? What do we want? Do we agree that the prosecution was unjust and wrong, celebrate that Meta is not being criminally prosecuted, lash out at the publishers filing the lawsuit and advocate for an official apology from the prosecutors and government that went after Aaron?

Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”?

Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?