I've been saying the same thing, Aaron Swartz arguably contributed more meaningful things long before AI, and was basically forced to make one of the worst decisions a person can make (at least in my opinion).

If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:

* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).

* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.

* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).

* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.

What happened to him?

He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.

It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.

The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims.

The Anthropic class action was already settled. It's what they mention in the opening of the article. Anthropic got in trouble for downloading the books (pirating) but it was determined to be fair use to use the content for training.

Aaron Swartz was not charged with piracy or downloading PDFs, even though that's how the story has been told. The charges were related to him breaking into a private wiring closet, hiding a laptop, and circumventing access controls on a system.

The Aaron Swartz charges were ridiculous. I'm not disputing that. However, there isn't an equivalent charge in this Anthropic case. Even if you or I get caught downloading pirated PDFs of eBooks from a torrent, the CFAA would not apply.

The main class action suit was already decided. The Stanford professors in this story opted out of the class action and are trying to get higher individual settlements with their own lawyers.

It seems like you believe it was wrong for Swartz to have been prosecuted. It doesn't seem like it would serve justice to prosecute other people in the same malicious way. Doing the wrong thing now just because a wrong thing happened in the past is not how a just society operates.

FWIW, the Aaron Swartz thing happened because an egomaniacal politician thought it would bolster her career. It was a fluke (her office was only involved by coincidence) with disastrous consequences.

We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.

Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:

> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.

Aaron Swartz ran so the labs could sprint. Markdown is ginormous. Every answer on Stack Overflow is licensed under Creative Commons 2.0. 20 years of human exchange on Reddit. And finally, the knowledge he decided should be free for all mankind can be sold back to us, through a meter, by the token.

If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.

The distinction (besides Anthropic being too big to be thrown in jail) is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers with intent to redistribute, and was publicly attacking copyright laws.

Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.

Thank you for not forgetting about him. I bring up this insane and tragic persecution and prosecutorial injustice and hypocrisy whenever I can.

I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.

> government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway

A case which never went to trial and tanked the prosecutor’s career resulting in no more prosecutions of its kind to date.

Let’s not hanker for a return to that.

the cfaa is extremely broad, but it doesn't cover downloading books from libgen and the like. there is no alleged unauthorized system access (in this case).

Of course nothing will happen. The wealthy play under a different set of rules in America.

The replies to you and giancarlostoro are of course disgusting, typical for "hacker" news (please the man, serve the man)

“Corrupt third-world country” is what we’ll end up calling most Western countries if we keep applying double standards in our justice systems.

Swartz made the mistake of not using it to make lots of money.

Thank you for saying this. I am getting tired of current SV speed running culture that actually like the means justify the end. And anyone that says “but ai will save so many lives every day delay is a genocide” spare me, you can’t prove that is true and you don’t get to violate established moral and legal principles in service of some vague and impossible to quantify future utopia.

And to be clear, Aaron should not have been charged under the circumstances.

does n.b. mean nota bene?

Aaron Swartz should not have been prosecuted. Full stop. His case should not (and I am fairly certain will not) be seen as legal precedent for employees at Anthropic. Each time I have read the headline for this story today on HN I clicked below the up arrow wishing that there was a way to downvote stories. Intellectual property bullies are not only aggressively boring, their clamor adds nothing constructive to society: it is purely parasitic and uninteresting discourse.

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Thank you for pointing this out. I always make this comparison when saying these people are thieves and should be subject to the same prosecution.

But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.

Thanks, Obama! (literally - https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/07/holder-doj-used-discreti...)