cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/55039106
The murderer's name is Carmen Ortiz. He died so she could "make her name" as a DA. Fucking piece of trash.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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Yeah, that's the big issue with the prosecutorial system. District attorneys are incentivized to secure convictions, not to seek the truth.
In fact, especially in criminal law, the truth is often completely irrelevant. The system is designed more to "make an example" out of people rather than simply ensuring the law functions as it should. It's a flawed design and a pretty damning reflection of our society.
This is the first post I've seen where my app (Boost) has shown the vote score as simply: 1k
Congrats guys. Lemmy is growing
When I see people remembering Aaron Swartz I SLAM THE UPVOTE BUTTON.
AS I SHOULD
A beautiful soul who was ripped from this world by the grief of trying to make it better.
Facebook stole from sites without the means to defend themselves. Schwartz stole from an organization with the means to financially ruin him and lock him up.
Sadly lady justice’s scales only tips for the side of money
Not sure if this is the right guy but iirc he also outright had permission to download material? Like it straight up wasn't a crime but they decided to prosecute him for it anyway.
Academic journals are huge grifts.
You pay to submit your article. The people who review your article are usually doing it for free/prestige - they aren’t usually paid by the journal. You don’t get paid when someone reads or downloads your article. The journals then make deals with institutions and libraries to sell these articles at monstrously ridiculous subscription fees, making the articles effectively inaccessible to the public. (JSTOR now lets you make a free account and access a couple little things, even that is a concession)
It’s not beneficial for anyone. They depend on the fact that you have to publish to have a career. Keep in mind tons of research is funded by public money too. These companies add almost no value and take in all of the profit.
Because of how shitty and scammy this system already was, more serious grifters have realized that they can run journals just to get paid. There’s an epidemic of these predatory journals publishing abysmal research.
Most of the people who write the articles hate this system too - many profs will often happily send you a pdf or chapter if you send a nice email.
Ok I simply don't understand how the same means and methods used by the free and open source software community have not been employed here. These are smart people! Just start your own damn free journal service, found a council and tap some industry-leading researchers in some common fields to start reviewing papers.
This is like driving through a decent neighborhood and being like "The mob rules this neighborhood? Why don't people just tell them to leave?".
Academic publishers are just very specialized gangs, there is no functional difference between the business model of Elsevier and the business model of a local crimelord.
This isn't hyperbole, it is a joke, but it is also just basically the truth of it.
Scientists are hamsters that are put onto specific hamster wheels that they must spin for a certain amount of time each day lest they be fired, one of those hamster wheels is doing free labor (peer reviewing) for academic journals like Elsevier. Like a good mafia system, academic publishers don't have to openly threaten to hurt scientists to compel them to do free labor as the system is set up to simply grind them to dust if they don't excitedly jump on the hamster wheel of providing free value to said academic publishers.
Imagine for a minute academic publishing was like the music industry except it paid musicians shit and all the profits, of which there were major profits, never went to the musicians but instead to a bunch of vacuous middlemen who condescendingly took the musicians money while telling them their labor is next to worthless. Lol (I am crying inside right now) now imagine that unlike the real music industry this hypothetical music industry was heavily subsidized by tax payers but still SOMEHOW those musicians still had all the profits of their labor transferred to the ownership of a small number of rich people even though taxpayers had paid for it and thus like the musicians deserved to own it themselves.
I am not in academia but did participate in published research both in college and in a job as a lab assistant afterward. I don't really think your analogy holds up. There is literally no cost to such a change; scientists just need to start READING and CITING papers from free, alternative journals for them to be legitimized. The profit incentives of the universities, private industry, and government that fund the majority of research are not affected by the choice of the medium of exchange of ideas. Only the journals' pockets.
You aren't wrong, there isn't actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.
The mafia is only ever just one jerk at the top who makes every chump underneath them scared enough not to look to their neighbor and go "do we really need this asshole?". Just understanding the current conditions as a pure product of individual agents agreeing to consent or not to is not a complete picture, you have to include in the context the ways in which a culture of consent both in what is necessary and what is possible is created that is essential to the suffocating power of the system to preclude other possibilities.
There's actually a bunch of journals that have Open Access (making the articles available for free, usually under Creative Commons licenses). That at least eliminates the cost for the readers.
However, that's not a guarantee the OA journals don't collect publication fees, or even that the fees would be smaller than on non-OA journals. Fees range from "just trying to keep the lights on" to "same ol' grift, but ostensibly nicer to the reader".
Also, starting a new journal is always a bit of a tricky process in that you obviously want the people to trust in the journal and starting from total zero makes it harder. There have been a bunch of journals that were outright scams and OA obviously won't fix that.
Also go ahead and guess what kinds of journals are considered prestigious in academia and will open critical doors for a scientist in their career....
hint, it isn't the ones trying to make academic publishing better and accessible for all
Yeah but he was a lefty libertarian who believed publicly funded research should be publicly available. If he were doing it for profit he wouldn't have had any problems.
It doesn't matter what he believed. They wanted to make an example of him and build their carriers thanks to that example. The only people they went after this hard were Julian Assange and Edward Snowden.
Didn't they want to make an example of him because of what he believed in?
Nope! They made an example of because they didn't know how to deal with internet crimes so they decided he will be the scapegoat for their failures even though they knew his so called crimes didn't require such harsh punishment. They went after him so hard to make an example out of him to warn others. If you think they did it because of his beliefs you're doing injustice to what he went through.
I would rather firmly disagree with you, youre doing a greater injustice to him by ignoring how the articles alleged to be distributed were part of his long held beliefs and civic activism. Attributing this solely to "not knowing how to deal with internet crimes" doesn't really fit either - the Paypal 14, a cyber bullying case, the Morris worm, etc were all prior cases using the same act as a basis to charge him.
Let's be clear - he was a staunch and long term supporter of open access to information long before the incident at MIT. PACER is a good example of that, which had no charges brought against him.
In terms of the prosecution, yes, that was a decision by the Mass AG. That decision would not appear to have anything to do with "not knowing", and more to do with seeking to continue an overly broad interpretation of the computer fraud and abuse act. An interpretation that had been challenged by legal experts for years.
Now into the specifics here - the Mass AG based the prosecution around Swartz having an intent to distribute the materials. This is the part that has to do with his beliefs. His previous public statements regarding open access to information were part of this intent to distribute alleged by the Mass AG. So yes, his beliefs absolutely played a role in his prosecution (see the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto by Swartz)
Why it was such a harsh approach was based around, as mentioned above, the Mass AG looking to use this as an example of how others could be prosecuted, to push the limits of how the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act could be applied, opening up more options for the AG to be "tough on crime" (Carmen Ortiz, an Obama appointee who resigned when Trump was coming in).
To note, Carmen Ortiz has been accused by judges of stretching evidence, providing gross exaggerations of events, having "unusual" prosecutions. She oversaw the arrest of someone who kinda sorta looked like a wanted suspect, she agreed in pleas to lesser sentences and leniency but would then seek harsh penalties, tried to take motel via civil forfeiture despite the owner not having been involved/identified as part of/charged with any crimes.
TL;DR:
His beliefs absolutely played a role, and the US AG in Mass, Carmen Ortiz, often went waaayyyy beyond to get the harshest punishments possible.
So, I firmly disagree with your statement.
Edit: Cleaned up a sentence up top to be more clear. The Mass AG would allege intent to distribute due to his beliefs, though he had not actually distributed them.
I respect your opinion and let me say that I agree that his beliefs played a role but he wasn't punished harshly because of his beliefs. He was made an example not because of his beliefs but because the people in charge at the time wanted to show that they are in control. You feeling strongly about how the prosecution put together their remarks and how they used his own remarks against him I understand. (I'll tell you that I'm a lawyer with over 20 years of experience you want to believe me or not is up to you.) But I can tell you if they were doing it just because of his beliefs they could've charged him for each and every copyrighted material he downloaded from the servers. Considering he downloaded gigabytes of material in mostly text format they could've went an charge him for each and everyone of those. Just by doing that they could have easily finish his life with thousands of years of prison sentence and charge him hundreds of millions in monetary damages. Instead they turned it into one big case. You can check the law and see if it's possible or not. In the end let's agree to disagree. I wish you well and I hope that he is in peace.
but because the people in charge at the time wanted to show that they are in control.
That is your opinion, and you are welcome to it.
I would say his beliefs played a role in how prosecution handled it. I would say the AG was making a political play, she was on the lookout for something in the technology realm already.
But I can tell you if they were doing it just because of his beliefs they could've charged him for each and every copyrighted material he downloaded from the servers.
Regarding this bit, he had not distributed anything and was permitted access to JSTOR and those materials. They pushed intent and his own words. There would be no basis for a copyright claim without distribution as he had access to those materials.
What they were hinging this on was his use of scripts making the access "unauthorized" by not using their interface directly. I don't see any way a copyright claim would be possible.
I'd say the only way he got such a harsh result was through the AGs abuse of the definitions of the computer fraud and abuse act, and the ignorance of the judiciary regarding most things technology.
In the end let's agree to disagree. I wish you well and I hope that he is in peace.
Agreed, and I hope so as well.
I would like to clarify something so that there won't be any misunderstandings. Law doesn't require distribution or intent to distribute. Copying a copyrighted material without proper approval or license is enough. Which is what he did.
Below is the related section from the US Copyright Law, under section 506 Titled "Criminal Offences":
(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
As you can see they didn't need his intentions to distribute it was a factor used not required. I hope I made it clear about why I don't think it was because if his beliefs.
I wish you well.
Copying a copyrighted material without proper approval or license is enough.
And he had legitimate access to the materials on JSTOR which was never in question. Copyright would not come into play without distribution as he had every right to download the materials.
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The difference is Aaron Schwartz was going to use it for good, while Meta is almost certainly only going to be using it for evil.
llama being free "open source" model is kinda good though?
I don’t trust the motives of people like Zuckerberg and the meta team who have historically used their technology to knowingly enable genocide.
geez I did not realize his role in reddit. I can't imagine what he would think about what its become and I think he would love the fediverse.
He was using them for academic purposes, which should have been covered under fair use too, makes the whole thing extra fucked up.
According to the college it was, according to the FBI they were going to prosecute him federally anyway.
He had legal access to JSTOR through MIT so I don't even think any crime was actually committed apart from maybe connecting a PC in their network closet without authorization and they never had any actual evidence that he was going to redistribute the material. He likely was planning on it, but never got that far.
The Internet was never the same after his death...it was the start of the downfall of the Internet as we knew it, but society too
The documentary about him is heart-breaking. I highly recommend it.
The Internet's Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz
Just finishing the film and now I get why I don't have a good memory of this. Had a bad period 2010 on crested by 2012 which then was a really bad year as the start of my new normal was kicking in. Ironically I basically had started being on reddit later into 2013 when things started turning around for me.
While I was aware of this I did not make the connetion and Im a bit ashamed to say I forgot about him. Need to add him to the mental wall of heores with luigi and ed. So aaron, ed, and luigi.
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This should be a legal defense moving forward.
But your honor, I only downloaded 0.03 Metas, I’m clearly not guilty. As the court knows, it’s only once you pass 0.5 Metas that you start to stay into the guilty territory.
Going to get a stern letter from their ISP
While I honestly agree with the theme, the difference is that Meta wasn't looking to share them with others, at least not in their original form.
I can download terabytes of content to train my AI (hypothetically) and I don't think anyone but my ISP (and not because of IP issues, more for being a disproportionate consumer of their resources) would notice me, including and whatever industry I was using content from. It's the sharing that incurs the real damages.
Admittedly, Generative AIs are basically going to "share" the content (with someone, likely for a fee) as well but not in its original form.
This just makes me think that we should feel less guilty for pirating. They've set a precedent, right?
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The good die young, dude was a big open source contributor and could have been a good Sam Altman.
We should never forget this guy, a true hero.
even if they do get punished it will just be a fine which is like a pocket change for them
I knew both of these happened, but I didn’t compare them in my brain until now. But that’s crazy.
Aaron Schwartz and Ian Murdock are the two people I have never met I truly mourn to this day. So much good that was just not compatible with this shitty world.
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