alt Hacker NewsI've been saying the same thing, Aaron Swartz arguably contributed more meaningful things long before AI, and was basically forced to make one of the worst decisions a person can make (at least in my opinion).
If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:
* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).
* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).
* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.
What happened to him?
He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.
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by the way, a year after swartz worked on RSS (so when he was 15) he joined the creative commons foundation and helped create the technical architecture for it. what a guy
> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse).
None of the federal charges really had anything to do with copying the files [1].
> Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
You are comparing the ridiculous DOJ press release number [2] for Swartz to Mitnick's actual sentence. You should compare like to like, so should be comparing 35 years for Swartz to the ridiculous DOJ press release number for Mitnick which was 200 years.
[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
Do you have a citation for the claim that Schwartz was only copying "publicly funded research papers"? My understanding is that he was trying to pull all of JSTOR, which would be copyrighted papers going back to all kinds of funding models from many countries, not just US public-funded research.
Don't get me wrong, as a researcher myself most of us see him (and his successors in piracy) as heroes that make our work a lot easier by making everything so easily accessible, usually even more convenient than our own institutional libraries. But your claim sounds like inaccurate myth-building.
> He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
Internally, this was not the case in 2013. u/kn0thing and u/spez were considered the founders, their retired jerseys hung on the wall, and no one ever mentioned Aaron Swartz.
> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.
The Aaron Swartz case is important to know about and has catalyzed some good discussions about CFAA reform, but that specific case is a lot more complicated than your summary.
Before I begin: I agree that the punishment was too significant for the crime. I completely agree on that count. Discussing the facts of the case draws a lot of angry downvotes, so to be clear: I'm not saying he deserved any of these sentences nor that the laws are written well. I'm trying to explain the facts.
The PDFs were open to downloads on the MIT network. Straightforward downloading of the PDFs wouldn't have been a CFAA violation. The case became complicated because he started circumventing restrictions on the downloads. This escalated to breaking into a wiring closet and hiding a laptop in the closed-off infrastructure. Once someone breaks into physical infrastructure to circumvent access restrictions, it gets really hard to argue that they weren't doing a form of unauthorized access.
> He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.
The plea deal (the correct comparison to Kevin Mitnick's case) would have been 6 months, not 35+ years.
Who specifically was involved in that and what are they up to now?
He was offered a 6 month plea deal. He took his own life due to depression. Something he tried to do multiple times in the past
Who were the prosecutors and lawyers involved in the Aaron Swartz case? Where are the pitchforks for them? You can't just hide behind "The Government".
>He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.
He did hack these systems and MIT's network. They had video of him in the MIT wiring closet and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I'm not saying it wasn't pursued aggressively out of political motivations, which seems supported if you dig enough, but the facts of the case were about more than PDFs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz