Laws only matter if you're not rich.

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!
- I love how ai isn't resulting in the collapse of everything, its just an annoyance. The worst thing so far is the excessive scraping and shrimp jesus.

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.
  Can we give punish him?
  
  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.
  
  No, he's part of the US oligarchy. Don't criticize too much or you might happen to have sudden, unexplainable tech problems and legal trouble. /s
- Old people and overreacting to normal things because new ideas are scary and confusing
  Name a more iconic duo
  
  I fear getting old because of this
- To be fair, he broke and entered a networking closet as well. But I guess that is a separate issue.
  
  broke what
  
  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.
  
  IIRC (could be wrong) the closet was unlocked. So can we really call that "breaking and entering?"
  
  Walking through an open door in a place you're authorized to access is going to be a hard sell on a B&E conviction, but okay.
- I can't remember his name but one particular Cia or FBI fuck was trying to make a name for himself and spun the whole thing as a big deal when crime wise, it could have potentially been trespassing at the maximum. They had been following aaron and looking for reasons to charge him which was giving him justified paranoia outside of this particular event
  
  Yeah, I think he setup his laptop in a private server room to ensure that he had maximum speeds, so they called it criminal trespassing.
  Such a fucked up incident.
- 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.
  Bigotry is always wrong.
  
  Boomer is a mindset.

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.

Rest in power, Aaron. 🫡
Eat the rich.
- It's Luigi time!

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.
- They know that liberation is a threat to them.

He was murdered. He did not commit suicide.

he didn’t kill himself, he was murdered and they framed it to look like he did.
for one, he was very vocal and political, he would’ve at least left a note….
for another, he was too smart and rich to think he couldn’t at least fight the charges….
i might have believed it if he had been sentenced, but he hadn’t even begun trial.

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.

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.
- You need to be "i own several politicians" level of rich before it helps
- Tbh I just couldn't think of a good title. Maybe "Laws don't matter if its a company doing it"?
- I see this post and think "progress toward the abolition of intellectual property". I'm sure Aaron would agree.
- Aaron himself was rich, which should tell you the obvious, that being rich was never a sole differentiator.
  you must be rich, white, and not too disruptive

Another reason to tell Obama to fuck himself.
- Along with his treatment of Snowden doing a public good.
  
  And the Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz

There is a very good documentary about Aaron's life: The Internet's Own Boy
Its license is Creative Commons, so it's on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M85UvH0TRPc
- Behind the bastards had a great episode on Swartz. It was their annual Christmas non bastard episode
  
  Unfortunately I can't listen to podcasts. If I only listen to something without visual stimulation my mind start to think about unrelated things, and I just can't follow what they speak about, I loose track after a while.
  Before podcasts there were radio talk shows, I hated them similarly, and I tuned to another station where they were playing music.
- The movie is on CC? Doing Aaron proud.

I am getting so sick of this fucked up world.

I love Anna's archive. I still buy e-books, but will download a drm free copy from the archive.

Crazy idea:
If copyright was invented to prevent printers from scooping authors’ work and out-competing them for sales…
Maybe copyright should only apply if you’re trying to compete with the author?
So like, not if you’re just a lowly individual trying to keep up with the references all of society is making, or understand the world you live in.
- LotR should have entered the public domain in 2023.
  Instead we got the Rings of Power.
- If we had the political power to fight Disney, then we could enact a UBI so everyone can get free art all the time.
- out-competing them for sales…
  Boy that is a really mental gymnastics way of saying "profiting from someone else's work".

It's becoming more and more obvious that they were always referencing bank accounts when saying we're a country of checks and balances.

Aaron Swartz lives on

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.

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?
- You can but you won’t win unless you can prove anything, so good luck with that.
  
  Even if you can, you're fighting against a company that has annual revenue similar to some country's GDP.
  No company should be allowed to get this big.
  
  Now we need something like nightshade for text.
- It's possibly classed as fair use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.
- plagiarism is an academic crime, not a civil tort.
  
  It’s a copyright violation to use someone’s work without permission. (Regardless of your feelings about copyright or intellectual property)

laws for thee not for me

who da fuck disliked the post? How dare you!
- 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.
  
  I don't think the post is a meme nor low effort content
  
  I guess I'd be fine with a piracy discussion
  
  Shoo go back to being poorly photographed in forest settings.
  
  Memes keep us going during dry times...
  But yeah once we have sufficient amount and quality of discussions, threat actors will use memes to suppress that.
- Probably the same person that snitched on Luigi.
  
  I would also snitch on a murderer tbh.