Just gonna say... Aaron Swartz faced years of prison time and ultimately decided to take his own life... for downloading scientific journal articles... to share freely with the world (aka not even profiting from it).

But a multi-billion dollar corporation downloading millions of copyrighted creative works so that they can reshape the entire labor market by training a new type of artificial intelligence model on that data set? Meh, sounds like Silicon Valley disruption, give the man a medal!

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spongebobstoes 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Aaron Swartz was treated unjustly because copyright sucks. we should oppose such laws and treatment, not wield them as retributive tools against our opponents

it is wrong to advocate for everyone to be treated equally unjustly. better to advocate for the removal of the bad laws/structures

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ipython 39 minutes ago | parent [-]

It would be easier to advocate for the reform of those laws if they were actually applied evenly.

I’m not calling for its use as a “retributive tool”. Just that it be applied evenly.

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spongebobstoes 24 minutes ago | parent [-]

advocating for more punishment under copyright law is directly opposed to reform or removal of the laws

court precedent is a useful tool of advocacy

	▲	ipython 15 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Technically he wasn’t charged with any copyright violations. See indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...

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lesuorac 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And Jstor dropped the lawsuit when Aaron deleted his local copy. DOJ didn't drop theirs.

I doubt Meta has deleted their local copy though ...

	▲	qingcharles an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		It's absolutely unthinkable that Meta and friends aren't still using a corpus containing the entirety of every book they can obtain. There is no way they're building frontier LLMs without it. You can be sure as hell the Chinese are doing it, so the US corps are absolutely still doing it.
	▲	alex1138 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And also I think MIT didn't defend Aaron but maybe I'm wrong about that

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defen 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

One man illegally downloading copyrighted material is a crime. Multinational corporations illegally downloading copyrighted material is the only remaining growth area in the US economy and vital to national security.

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Melatonic 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Truly ahead of his time

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zajio1am 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, Meta also shared their AI models freely with world

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alex1138 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Had Aaron copied Snapchat 5 times the DOJ would've been fine with it all. His fault for not having the foresight

	▲	alex1138 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		(I'm being sarcastic. Zuck gets rewarded for continually copying Snapchat features into his products)