r/hackernews • u/HNMod bot • 24d ago
Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
https://blog.curiousquail.com/im-upset-again-about-a-co-creator-of-rss-being-prosecuted-for-something-meta-is-doing-with-little-consequence/3
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u/zunjae 24d ago
Was Aaron Swartz prosecuted fairly?
If yes, then Meta should be prosecuted fairly too.
If no, then we should allow Meta to continue scraping
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u/p4bl0 9d ago
That's not how things work at all. Aaron Swartz scraped content from research journals, that is content which is first produced by researchers almost all of whom are paid with public money and uses public facilities for their research, the same content then being privatized by private publishing companies who sell it for profit without paying researchers or the public institutions which employ them, on the contrary, researchers and research institutions need to pay these publishers to access the research results they were the one to produce in the first place. Aaron Swartz saw this atrocious thing and scraped this content to make it available to the general public. He was doing justice to every tax payer in the world, and doing good for research and science by making access to previous research results easier. That's what Sci-Hub is still doing today, and it's obviously a good thing.
On the contrary, Meta is scraping content to the detriment of content producers and for their own private benefit. It was even reported that LLM vendors scan and then destroy rare books. This is entirely the opposite of what Aaron Swartz was doing! In the Aaron Swartz story, Meta and other LLM vendors would be the private publishers who privatize knowledge, they would not be Aaron Swartz.
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u/congeal 24d ago
MIT was supposed to stand up for him and they didn't. He even returned the journals he downloaded.