Not to mention that Swartz had a JSTOR account, which means he was legally entitled to download the things that he did. The part they didn't like was that he used scripts to download en-mass, and a bunch of boomer fucks thought he actually committed a crime.
Well in the Social Network movie and chapter 2 of the Accidental Billionaires, Mark Zuckerberg used wget in shell scripts to get copyrighted images for private servers.
Spotify also originally got all its music by pirating it. But later it started printing money for record labels (while fucking over musicians) so all was forgiven.
The university AND jstor were pretty quick to get as uninvolved from that mess as quick as possible, so it really doesn't matter.... But what you're saying has nothing to do with the case and is also not true. "Broke and entered" implies forced physical access into a clearly forbidden area. The network closet was a room that was left unlocked and was frequently used by janitorial staff to put junk in.
I'm with you right up to the ageism. The folks who persecuted Aaron were older than him, but they were not boomers, and what they did had nothing to do with his age or theirs.
Important to note Aaron was helping democratize information while companies like Meta, Amazon, Google and Microsoft just centralize, twist and redact information to monetize access to a dumbed down and censored version of it.
They'd make better fertilizer (especially with that plastic-eating fungus on hand), so there's taking a bite outta world hunger in the same stroke. 🤷🏼♂️
Goes to show how much of a joke copyright is. These laws are bought by and made to protect the interests of corporations.
disgusting.
rip aaron schwarz, your ideas live on.
Meta hoards the commons like a dragon, pillaging open archives to train its soulless algorithms, while Aaron Swartz—a true steward of knowledge—was hunted down for daring to share.
One gets a slap on the wrist, the other gets a noose of legal threats. Justice? No, this is corporate feudalism, where the lords rewrite the rules and the serfs pay with their lives.
Aaron wanted liberation; Meta wants monopoly. The system rewards the parasite and punishes the visionary. Remember that next time you scroll through their ad-soaked wasteland.
Is it safe to assume that every single author (apart from the ones that cannot prove their works were in any of those archives at the time) can sue meta for plagiarism and theft?
This is like the worst example possible, considering Aaron himself was rich, which should tell you the obvious, that being rich was never a sole differentiator.
But that might be too disruptive to the current echo chamber.
I genuinely believe that if he was still around he'd of ended up a proponent for federated social media. I'm pretty sure he was the driving force behind opening it's source, and it wasn't until four years after his death that it was closed off again.
Any discussion/advice community that allows low-effort meme slop will inevitably become choked out by it. I understand I am in the minority and the mods like having the memes, but eventually we'll need /c/piracydiscussion if content of this formatting is permitted.
Obviously 99% of people here would agree that Aaron Swarts' story is a tragedy. But simple low-hanging fruit content is not what I want this place to have. And like it or not this community is likely to become the single biggest place to discuss piracy as Reddit inevitably cracks down on it.
Fuck meta and a BIG FUCK OFF to AI and all the companies slurping up ai slop "tech" to implement it in their rubbish software, apps, white goods, appliances.. Fuck. It's just infected every conceivable facet of our lives and no one is objecting it, it's like everyone suddenly forgot about how many engineers spoke out about the dangers!