Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
Article URL: https://blog.curiousquail.com/im-upset-again-about-a-co-creator-of-rss-being-prosecuted-for-something-meta-is-doing-with-little-consequence/ Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379550 Points: 330 # Comments: 48
Aaron Swartz, a co-creator of the RSS protocol, faced severe legal consequences for allegedly downloading 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR. He was charged with excessive penalties, including 35 years in prison, a $1 million fine, and asset forfeiture. This led to Swartz's tragic decision to end his life rather than face the court and financial ruin.
In stark contrast, Facebook, also known as Meta, has been accused of downloading 80 terabytes of books to train their AI models. Despite this massive data scraping, Meta has faced only a court case and a likely minor financial penalty. Meanwhile, Swartz's use case involved the dissemination and archival of knowledge, while Meta's intention is to power up their proprietary plagiarism code, enriching their CEO and making one of the world's richest individuals even wealthier.
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- Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence blog.curiousquail.com
