alt Hacker NewsAaron Swartz was facing up to 35 years for wire fraud and hacking for swiping some JSTOR documents, and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.
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>and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.
For good reason. Courts have so far ruled AI training is fair use, and it doesn't look likely to be overturned by the supreme court. Theres also the matter of some labs pirating books to get training data, which is illegal (they lost in civil court), but it's unclear whether that can be criminally prosecuted.
Meanwhile, in China they got the best video models cause they don't care much about IP. The irony that China, by being a threat, is preventing the west from lurching toward totalitarian is really interesting.
The obligatory:
“The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have
the just’s umbrellas.”
It's not at all relevant to this thread, but no he wasn't. At their worst, prosecutors were threatening to push for 7 years; the guideline sentence for Swartz's offense, were he to take it to trial and lose, would likely have been under the level allowing for straight probation (go to a sentencing calculator and plug the values in); writing after his death, his own lawyer stated that had he gone to trial and lost he was unlikely to face a custodial sentence at all.
We get this "35 year" number from adding up all the counts he faced, taking their maximum sentence. That's just not how sentencing works. Like charges group, and you're sentenced according to the most severe charge.
People cite these numbers in part because DOJ posts them in their press releases. DOJ is in these instances lying. When we amplify those lies, we're doing their work for them.
Aaron Swartz was not charged for violating IP either.
So you are for shutting down xcancel?
Because that's not what IP law is for. IP law was always corporate rent-seeking. None of those arguments about fairly compensating people for their creations or preserving the profit motive were ever being made in good faith. The point was always to force you to pay for something that would be free under natural laws. And I do mean you specifically, because the act of copying information freely was always going to be preserved for them.