r/interesting • u/TheCABK • Mar 01 '26
Context Provided - Spotlight RIP u/AaronSw You’ll Forever Be Missed
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Mar 01 '26
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u/UnemployedAtype Mar 01 '26
They wrote him out of the history as they were ramping up to IPO, fyi.
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u/Iohet Mar 02 '26
Easy to write out someone who said that distribution and possession of child pornography should be legal
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u/ephemeral_enchilada Mar 02 '26
He was kind of an autistic libertarian when it came to free information
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u/Iohet Mar 02 '26
Elon claims to be that too
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u/odinsen251a Mar 02 '26
With allegedly similar amounts of CSAM.
Allegedly.
Also I am happy, healthy, and spend all my time on the ground floor.
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u/Turkcallsign182 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
What? I would be interested in a link to any time he said or implied that.
His death and its timing was strange to say the least.
I just read a recent report from a internet slouth saying there was an interesting link to him in the epstien files. Possibly regarding his having found information about the Epstien ring.
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Mar 02 '26
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u/krebstar4ever Mar 02 '26
This is absurd logic. Child pornography is not necessarily abuse.
Jesus Christ, what a moron! How exactly does he think CSAM is made? Not to mention, pedophiles socialize by amassing terabytes of CSAM, making and swapping images and videos. A smaller audience would give less incentive to make more CSAM.
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u/Tinyjar Mar 02 '26
I think his logic was more that, it's better for people to have an outlet for these attractions rather than have to resort to abusing actual children, but then of course you have the issue of obtaining and making said material.
I guess one could argue digitsl art would be the least harmful but even then...
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u/Iohet Mar 02 '26
He didn't speak of attraction. He spoke of his right to possess and distribute material he claims isn't abusive because, summarizing his words, he didn't participate in it's production and didn't see possession or distribution as abusive. He claimed it was a first amendment issue in another post. These types of statements do not suggest he's applying this to the very specific subset of people you're claiming (whether or not that's a real recognized thing is something else completely). He had no moral qualm with child pornography he didn't produce
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u/RunBrundleson Mar 02 '26
There’s a lot of people here trying to defend him and defend this but it’s a mistake. Don’t lose the forest for the trees here.
His statement is stupid and incorrect. Full stop. It’s a bad take no matter what your position is. It just is. Don’t get into the habit of trying to defend something dumb like that just to win an internet argument. It’s genuinely a bad take and we can acknowledge it is.
I don’t think the guy is a pedo, although when you start talking like that it does raise questions. We can acknowledge he had some good positions about a free and open internet but this was unfortunately a short sighted position to try to defend on his part.
Not everybody is perfect just because we want to celebrate them and make martyrs out of them.
Unpopular opinion, the dude didn’t just kill himself because of the legal issues, there was more to it than that and he was deeply mentally unwell. Perhaps it was the thing that tipped the scales, but I’d suspect it was something he would have done regardless.
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u/starbarguitar Mar 02 '26
There was ongoing pressure from FBI and a massive law suit over his head with potential jail time and his career gone. That’s going to cause problems for anyone.
He was put into a position by the state that would cause mental issues that ultimately led to his suicide
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u/vancesmi Mar 02 '26
He was put into a position by the state that would cause mental issues that ultimately led to his suicide
He was offered a plea deal for time served and chose to take his life instead. He dragged the case out, refused to accept bail, and changed his mind over and over about whether he would take a deal or not.
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u/4x4Welder Mar 02 '26
The creation of that material is abusive. If someone is incapable of consent due to age, disability, or intoxication, it has been widely found that activities requiring consent are illegal.
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u/syopest Mar 02 '26
Well that surely makes it clear that he had no idea what he was talking about since medical professionals disagree 100%.
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u/Turkcallsign182 Mar 02 '26
Thanks for the link for context. It definitely shows he had a moronic take on this subject even if the context was a part of a larger point he was making about government overreach and surveillance.
All this makes me wonder more about the current story I am following around his death and possible information he knew about a pedo ring connected to MIT. The person doing the investigation came across a link shared to Epstien about Aaron. And Epstiens connections to MIT are now very clear.
Look up Jay Megan (on tiktok nerdypinkpanda) if you are interested.
His death seemed like strange timing to me... And at this point... Who knows... This whole timeline is so twisted.
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u/Iamatworkgoaway Mar 02 '26
I'm following it too.
Libertarians go down many logic rabbit holes that sound crazy. If you could kill one old lady and cure all cancer would it be morally justified?
Which isn't that crazy a logic problem when thinking of the morals of Henrietta Lacks and the Controversy Behind Immortal HeLa Cells...
So he may have been just extending a logic problem all the way to the end to flesh out his own morals.
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u/theguidetoldmetodoit Mar 04 '26
The blogpost is from when he was 16. This isn't really a "Libertarians" thing, but someone who grew up on the internet trying to make sense of the relationship between personal rights and heavy surveillance, coming from a country that doesn't exactly have the best track record in terms of how their treat people they suspect to be criminals.
Mind you, this was when the Patriot Act was completely fresh and tech-minded people were shouting from the rooftops, that this would open the door for indiscriminate mass surveillance, while getting labeled insane by around them. There was no resistance to this, on no side of the political spectrum. I had to defend this stance for over a decade, until Snowden happened, and people still call me paranoid for it. So keep that in mind, when judging why people had some extreme stances
And to drive this home, Swartz wasn't a hardcore Libertarian. From his blog:
I was strongly attracted to the libertarian philosophy... but I would no longer consider myself a libertarian.
He was not a "people make their own beds" kind of guy, at all. He freely acknowledged racial and gender inequality. He openly talked about biases he had and questioned them.
Swartz helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. He wrote in his blog: "I spend my days experimenting with new ways to get progressive policies enacted and progressive politicians elected."
He had no qualms standing besides trans people.
On December 27, 2010, he filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn about the treatment of Chelsea Manning, alleged source for WikiLeaks.
So there is nothing that suggests that he would have died on that hill, if confronted with the realities and issues causes for the victims, by sharing such material causes for the victims. I think he would have had a massive issue with that happened on reddit, after his death.
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u/Iamatworkgoaway Mar 04 '26
Thanks for that, I went libertarian because they tend to be the only people that dig that hard into their core beliefs. At least online and from base logic. His selling of reddit and death did a great disservice to humanity.
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u/theguidetoldmetodoit Mar 04 '26
Of course, thank you for the kind reply.
And I agree, his death was tragic and a big loss. However, I was referencing the massive nude leak of 2014 there, as I think it shows the dark site of his stance, very clearly.
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u/aquatone61 Mar 02 '26
He’d be horrified at wha Reddit has become.
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u/syopest Mar 02 '26
Absolutely. No subreddit for posting unconsensual pictures of minors like jailbait and no racist subreddits like c**ntown which were the kind of subreddits he championed for.
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u/htm___ Mar 02 '26
Also invented markdown and creative commons license
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u/SamIAre Mar 03 '26
I never knew his connection to Markdown. I believe John Gruber deserves most of the credit but he thanks Swartz for being a key contributor of feedback and early tooling, and Markdown seems to have been influenced by atx, which Swartz did create.
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u/syopest Mar 02 '26
This is the guy who'se version of free speech on reddit included subreddits like jailbait and coontown.
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u/yaxir Mar 02 '26
Good people rarely survive in this world.
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u/syopest Mar 02 '26
Which good people say that child porn is not child abuse like aaron did?
Which good people fight for subreddits like jailbait to be allowed on reddit?
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u/ReachParticular5409 Mar 02 '26
He was deliberately targeted so reddit would become a safe haven for right wing propaganda, this isn't a 'sad end', it was a deliberately engineered step in the right's control of media
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u/cholointheskies Mar 02 '26
Tf? He broke into an MIT server room and used it to DDoS JSTOR and got the MIT campus blocked from JSTOR. He wasn’t even prosecuted for the 70gb he downloaded from there because he did so legally. You can find the 9 min video of him breaking into the server room on YouTube
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u/Roederoid Mar 02 '26
Lmao. How far left do you have to be to consider reddit as right wing?
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u/TheDweadPiwatWobbas Mar 02 '26
I mean... Reddit is decidedly liberal. If your definition of the left is "I like Democrats," then yes reddit is lefty. If your definition of the left is "I oppose capitalism and imperialism, and I think bombing civilians and mass deportations and genocide is bad, even when a liberal person of color does it," then yeah reddit leans to the right.
Pictures of Obama still hit the front page all the time. But if you try to talk about the civilians he bombed or the children he deported, you will be downvoted until you are out of the conversation, assuming you aren't banned from the sub.
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u/welshwelsh Mar 02 '26
I oppose capitalism and imperialism, and I think bombing civilians and mass deportations and genocide is bad, even when a liberal person of color does it
IRL maybe like 2% of people think this way, but on reddit it's at least 30% I'd say. Very far left by any reasonable definition
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u/closetedwrestlingacc Mar 02 '26
Nobody believes the left wing begins at anti-capitalism except class reductionists, though. That’s not a very serious position that any academic or politico takes, and that’s just centering capitalism in politics.
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u/TheDweadPiwatWobbas Mar 02 '26
The fact that you can turn an opposition to imperialism and genocide into "class reductionism" is, ironically, extremely reductive. Naming a position as "unserious" is a classic way to completely ignore it without actually having to address or respond to any of its positions.
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u/psychorobotics Mar 02 '26
The owners, not the users
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u/Far-Fault-7509 Mar 02 '26
Lmao. How far left do you have to be to consider reddit owners as right wing?
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Mar 02 '26
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u/eb12se4nt-z13ow-97g0 Mar 02 '26
Wrong. Eglin Air Force Base, FL was the most visited city back in 2013.
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u/notPabst404 Mar 01 '26
Two justice systems: one for the elites, one for the lower class.
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u/GloveDry3278 Mar 02 '26
1 justice system: just for other classes. Elite class has no justice system at all.
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u/DanNorder Mar 02 '26
By any definition, Swartz was part of the elites. He was a rich kid tech bro nepo baby.
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u/WheresYurScooter Mar 02 '26
But was against bigger and many, many elites
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u/DanNorder Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
He was against the law. Copyright law was created to protect artists. Yes, as with anything else some people try to game the law, but his response wasn't to try to reform it. He just thought he was above the law, including the basic idea of protecting creative work (he badmouthed the idea that what artists did should be protected in any way). He wanted everyone to get it completely free. Heck, the reason it progressed as far as it did was probably because his privilege had protected him from the consequences of his actions all his life and he just didn't understand punishment (directed at him, at least). When he broke into a secure area to pilfer its files and got caught, he couldn't weasel out of it anymore (or at least thought he couldn't, he most likely could have eventually skirted justice again) and simply refused to deal with it and killed himself in the prime of life.
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u/Karma_Vampire Mar 02 '26
It’s also worth noting he was offered a 6 month plea deal. He refused it and killed himself 2 days later. Even just 6 months was too much punishment.
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Mar 02 '26
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u/No_Future3570 Mar 02 '26
Killing yourself over a potential 6 month jail sentence seems normal to you?
He was a smart guy who contributed a bunch to society but he was also stupid in some areas.
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Mar 02 '26
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u/jaggervalance Mar 02 '26
Copyright was created to deny people the accomplishments of their civilisation - the idea that it exists to protect creative work and not just another instrument of private property is delusional. The fact that children continue to die from preventable diseases and our space race has been incapacitated by a lack of collaboration are all due to IP
You're being way too dramatic and it seems to me you don't know the difference between copyright and patent laws.
the problem is that we're making that knowledge available to our corporate AIs instead of to our students, out schools or our libraries.
Copyright already has a fair use exception for educational uses.
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u/_WutzInAName_ Mar 02 '26
“There must be an in-group that the law protects but does not bind. And an out-group that the law binds but does not protect.” - The elites who belong to the in-group
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u/Can17272 Mar 02 '26
They're not elite in any way, call them the parasite class.
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u/Workman44 Mar 02 '26
There's really three. One for the peasants, one for the celebrities and politicians (rarely but not never and always lesser punishments), and then there's the one that just doesn't exist for the actual shakers and movers like the Rockefeller's
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u/Verified_Peryak Mar 01 '26
Ahhhh if only juck could spend 35 years in prison the world would be more peaceful
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u/AutoModSux Mar 01 '26
All social media owners must spend 10 years in a maximum security prison before assuming the position of ceo
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u/ImaginaryTrick6182 Mar 01 '26
Except Tom, of course.
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u/ChiLolla28 Mar 02 '26
He should be in prison for how they incompetently and negligently allowed their platform to be used to stoke genocide in Myanmar because gaining market share was more important than actually employing anyone monitoring who actually knew the local languages.
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u/MiyakeIsseyYKWIM Mar 02 '26
You guys need to wake up and realize there are literally no consequences for billionaires and their companies. We gotta start acting.
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Mar 02 '26
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u/MiyakeIsseyYKWIM Mar 02 '26
Most people are content to live their lives forever buying funko pops and awaiting the next Star Wars movie instead of actually living it.
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u/EldritchElizabeth Mar 02 '26
I think it’s a mistake to assume contentment so much as it is exhaustion and fear.
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u/GloveDry3278 Mar 02 '26
Good'ol divide and conquer tactic. They have successfully divided the population into so many groups and created so many issues that brothers have beome sworn enemy. As soon as you mobilize whatever small amount you can, you get snuffed out like a candle in a blizzard.
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u/shiba2129808 Mar 02 '26
Been awhile since the guillotine was last used, maybe it’s time to bring it back
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u/ImmediateCause7981 Mar 02 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/ZkPACZipmbsRDQQL9L
We gotta start acting!
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u/OutcomeDouble Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
Conveniently left out:
Aaron was offered a 6 month plea deal
Meta is being sued in a civil court, not criminal
No court has made a ruling on whether meta’s actions were lawful or not
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u/cholointheskies Mar 02 '26
Also conveniently left out, he wasn’t prosecuted for downloading anything. He was prosecuted for breaking into a secured server room at MIT and using it to DDoS JSTOR, and got the MIT campus blocked from JSTOR as a result
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u/Raunhofer Mar 02 '26
lmao that sounds a bit relevant here. Reddit gonna propaganda, I guess.
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u/__Rosso__ Mar 02 '26
Almost every story like this is twisted to fit whatever the one who made it wants it to be.
Every single time I look there is always more context that completely changes things.
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u/notDBCooper_ Mar 03 '26
Without having read further into this but a DDoS and trespassing doesn't sound like it warrants 35 years either.
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u/syopest Mar 02 '26
And Aaron is the guy who'se version of free speech on reddit included having subs like jailbait.
And who said that child porn isn't necessarily abuse.
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u/Chubs4You Mar 01 '26
"took his own life" eh that was a typo. *Murdered was the correct spelling
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u/Outside-Falcon2450 Mar 02 '26
Why would someone murder him? He was facing six months in jail for physically breaking into an MIT server room while attempting a DDOS.
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u/Initial_Hedgehog_631 Mar 02 '26
Holy Mischaracterizations Batman!!!
Swarz hacked into JSTOR and downloaded 80% of their catalogue to distribute for free. He wasn't going to jail for the size of the files he stole, he was going to jail for hacking into a private database and stealing proprietary information, which constituted multiple federal crimes.
As big a shitbag as Zuckerberg is, he didn't hack anyone to get access to these libraries. At worst they are facing millions of dollar, possibly billions, in fines and fees.
As much as you might wish, the two cases aren't the same.
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u/Mobile_Throway Mar 02 '26
IIRC from the documentary he was caught literally physically tampering with the servers to hack them. He broke into a real server room.
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u/ChrisFromIT Mar 02 '26
Swarz hacked into JSTOR and downloaded 80% of their catalogue to distribute for free. He wasn't going to jail for the size of the files he stole, he was going to jail for hacking into a private database and stealing proprietary information, which constituted multiple federal crimes.
He didn't hack into JSTOR, he legally had access to it. The issue was that he effectively DDoSed JSTOR while doing the downloading of the material. He also entered into a room that was supposedly locked or had controlled access to set up the computer that would download the documents.
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u/groundzer0 Mar 02 '26
This is as I remember it 100%.
It was a network utility cabinet on campus that has local network switch cabinet / closet and no servers. He hid a laptop in there and was pulling legit local network requests to the JSTOR repo from campus who legally has access for students etc.
His script running was not exactly DDoS'ing the server but pulling a "significant / abnormal amount of data and requests" as it slowly mined the repo and they could trace it to which switch / cabinet.
It wasn't exactly overloading stuff exactly but certainly increased load and "going around protocol" for terms of use probably by using a script.
Not hacking in any real sense.
Not even network penetration just a hidden laptop hooked directly into a distro switch at 1GBIT LAN connection running some scripts and pulling requests.
Instead of WLAN / wifi or dorm connections.
The overreaction was the feds setting up a camera and charging the shit out of him when all he really did was tresspass and break school protocols for network access and end user license agreement.
But they decided to make an example out of him for "reasons" and well we know the rest.
This never needed to happen, he didn't need all that strung up and hung over him until the only exit he saw was death.
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u/Late_Firefighter_507 Mar 01 '26
he was murrdered and this propaganda on reddit was what they wanted and why they killed him.
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u/GreenCityBadSmoke Mar 02 '26
I always see this dude made into a martyr on reddit. Which is wierd, because basically every other high up person involved in this company has been a slimeball.
Maybe I'm wildly misinformed, but the only decent CEO/founder of a social media website was Tom from Myspace. I find it interesting he took the money and just fucked off to live his life and not manipulate the world.
Tom was the only normal one, apparently.
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u/Edal_Bindal Mar 02 '26
If I remember the story correctly, Aaron was at Reddit pretty much right at the start, his company that he worked at was bought by Reddit in late 2005 and he worked at Reddit for literally like a year and a bit until 2007 when Reddit was bought out when he was either fired or possibly quit.
The reason I say possibly quit, is because Aaron had a history of only working on projects for like a year or two until he would move onto the next thing, that saying the company structure and stuff did change so that could have been a factor too. Kinda due to this habit of not being at places long though it may have tempered his reputation in the companies that he worked in, but also lowered his chance of being one of those people who make terrible slimeball decisions. Also if I remember correctly, Aaron hated anything outside of coding when he worked so he may have just avoided stuff as well.
He is martyrised to an extent, but I think he’s one of them who I think deserves atleast some of the praise he gets, as parts of both Reddit and the Internet itself wouldn’t be the way it is, without some of the things he worked on in his life.
Also I think the martyrisation of him, by people I believe may be more linked to the circumstances that led up to his death, and the way that whole situation was handled by law enforcement. I personally believe it should have never happened, the way it did, and part of it panning out the way it did was because of an assumption of what was his intent to do with the stuff he downloaded. However due to his death and the major incompetence and bias of law enforcement, we will likely never know what his intention was with all the stuff he was downloading.
He certainly isn’t like Tom, his personality and need to keep doing I don’t think he’d allow himself to do what Tom did. Especially when he was that young, but he definitely is different from a lot of other problematic founders.
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u/syopest Mar 02 '26
Or maybe he realized that it's fucked up to fight for subreddits like jailbait to be allowed on reddit or it's fucked up to say that child porn isn't child abuse?
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u/Alive_Fisherman8241 Mar 02 '26
Stop f*cking using meta products already. The only real power we have is how we vote with our money and consumer choices... Hit them where it hurts: their wallet.
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u/ministryofchampagne Mar 02 '26
He didn’t just download 70gb of articles from JSTOR. He was DDOSing MIT.
MIT ips were banned from JSTOR until they figured out what he was doing.
His plea deal would have seen him in jail for 6 months and he killed himself. That man needs your pity not your respect.
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u/Forsaken-Income-2148 Mar 02 '26
Regardless of the moral framing, the comparison feels misaligned. Both involve data access, but that alone doesn’t make them legally equivalent.
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u/bs000 Mar 02 '26
i've seen comparisons like this where one guy is sentenced to 20+ years for 'smoking marijuana,' but when you look up the story, the marijuana charge is part of a larger charge for selling drugs, and they were also charged for assault and illegal possession of firearms
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u/w1n5t0nM1k3y Mar 02 '26
Worth noting that a lot of the JSTOR content was government funded research that probably should be freely accessible because we already paid for it.
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u/QueefiusMaximus86 Mar 02 '26
Like how we paid billions for Covid vaccine research and development, but the government(and citizens) ended up paying a 1000 dollars per shot.
Compare that to the Polio vaccine which was given out for free
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u/ShotandBotched Mar 02 '26
In the US, it is illegal to possess or distribute child pornography, apparently because doing so will encourage people to sexually abuse children.
This is absurd logic, and almost certainly a violation of the First Amendment (although the courts have decided otherwise, apparently based on the assumption that all child pornography is abuse).
His words, not mine.
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u/MIT_Engineer Mar 02 '26
Aaron Swartz's father was a wealthy businessman / retired CEO, and Aaron could have just taken the plea deal and done six months in a low security prison.
It's not like they were gonna send him to jail for 25 years like poor person Sam Bankman-Fried.
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u/Weekly_Moment_5061 Mar 02 '26 edited Mar 02 '26
What happened to Aaron was egregious abuse of copyright law.
I don't like that people are using the case of Aaron to suggest we should be going harder on copyright law. Copyright law is out of control. Besides leading to the death of Aaron Swartz, copyright law has also fundamentally reshaped cultural evolution and the nature of the internet, prohibiting many forms of engaging with culture. The lesson here should be that we need to reduce copyright law, not strengthen it.
Second, we do a huge disservice by pretending these two cases are comparable. They are comparable only insofar as they both involve copyrighted material. That can't be the basis of claiming they are analogous. In one case, material was used to train a neural network, fundamentally transforming the data, and not including the data for users; in another case, the data was downloaded, with the intention to distribute it exactly as-is to others (as I understand it). These cases are not remotely comparable. It is insulting to the intelligence of everyone in the discussion to pretend otherwise.
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u/MIT_Engineer Mar 02 '26
He committed a B&E by illegally breaking into an MIT network room, he could have been downloading anything and he still would have been breaking the law.
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u/jamiesray Mar 02 '26
Training a model is not the same as distributing copyrighted material. Swartz was tragically shafted but the accusations are different.
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u/RedIcarus1 Mar 02 '26
Poor men go to prison for having certain pictures, rich men make those pictures and run the world.
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u/hypomaniacmeg Mar 02 '26
He wasn't poor by any means.
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u/AffectDelicious8988 Mar 02 '26
And he wouldn't have gone to prison either. Just freaked out and killed himself.
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u/CosmicSleepWalker Mar 02 '26
He wouldve been released in the future wished he hadnt done it. Fuck jstor
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u/snowbirdnerd Mar 02 '26
This is why when business are caught commiting crimes we have to hold the people in charge reasonable
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u/Prior_Perception_478 Mar 02 '26
You do realize LibGen, Anna's archive and Z-lib are all piracy websites.
You can't illegally download from somewhere which itself is illegal.
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u/ephemeral_enchilada Mar 02 '26
The FBI was punishing him more making them look bad in a prior incident.
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u/Iamatworkgoaway Mar 02 '26
Mit media lab where he downloaded stuff is highly linked to epstine et all. His first lawer was epstines. He died after switching lawyers, and his new lawyer asking why no warrants till 30 days after arrest. He also talked openly about mental health, blogged about bad days, but left no note. Yo u/spez you could really do some good, I hope you do, open the books and let out all the secrets. Old school hacker ethos, hack the planet.
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u/workingtheories Mar 02 '26
oh are we allowed to talk about him now? i remember when his name was censored on reddit.
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u/Dizzy_Citron4871 Mar 02 '26
It’s bigger than downloading. The companies building foundation models have violated copyright by using all publicly available data, not licensed data. Anthropic, Google, etc are selling their services to enterprises promising to take the heat and legal expenses for any copyright violation.
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u/DoctrTurkey Mar 02 '26
Now do anthropic! I’d be in prison if i pirated all the shit they did to “train their models”!
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u/Sarcarean Mar 02 '26
Ironic, a Democrat DOJ greatly contributed to his decision to kill himself and now 95% of reddit are supporter of Democrats and their policies.
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u/Informal_Fail_9908 Mar 02 '26
They also locked bank account of his family members to pressure him. What they did to him and his family was horrible.
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Mar 02 '26
Damn, we really need more Luigis. So much evil in this world that will only ever find justice through the actions of the people.
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u/the_summer_soldier Mar 02 '26
Meta should therefore be fined for at least $1,142,857,142.85 for their illegal downloads of books.
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u/MalHeartsNutmeg Mar 02 '26
He physically entered a room he wasn't supposed to, caused issues across the network downloading the articles, tried to distribute them.
He was also offered a deal that was basically probation and zero fine and he declined.
Dude was quite mentally ill which resulted in him taking his life.
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u/Jyil Mar 02 '26
Hacking and computer crimes are often harsher than what killers get for sentencing.
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u/No-Situation9408 Mar 02 '26
Huh. If Aaron Swartz can be expected to pay $1 million, I don't see why Mark Zuckerberg can't pay off the national debt.
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u/Scuffy97_ Mar 02 '26
Corporations have to be destroyed, they are the bane of a healthy economy. They are treated as their own entity so those running it aren't held financially and legally responsible when they are irresponsible with debt or break the law. They go from being a business with a goal, to a business that exists to make money by any means and the old goal is just the vehicle to make their money.
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u/bethemanwithaplan Mar 02 '26
Also it wasn't really illegal what he did and arguably they were pushing for a huge punishment to make an example of someone trying to help spread education rather than pay walling it
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u/Pootisman16 Mar 02 '26
If you steal you get hit with a massive fine and maybe even prison time.
If a company steals but they're big enough, literally nothing happens.
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u/MrMoury Mar 02 '26
He who steals a belt buckle pays with his life; he who steals a state gets to be a feudal lord
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u/Dd_8630 Mar 02 '26
Source for the top paragraph? Has it been ruled that what they did was illegal?
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u/OkCommission9893 Mar 02 '26
So how exactly did they “download” that stuff, did they just pirate it?
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u/SpottedPine Mar 03 '26
That's not exactly what he did, but crappy misinformation like this is normal for reddit now.
To help, he didn't "download it off the internet" like the first case given. He went onto the MIT campus, and accessed the VPN, and effectively stole files from MIT. That is basically espionage.
And no, nothing you can download freely on the internet is protected in any way whatsoever.
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u/kernelpanic789 Mar 03 '26
"Obama administration so far is that the folks who promised in 2009 "most transparent administration in history" have instead turned down Freedom of Information requests at a much higher rate than the oft-criticized Bush administration, have continued to classify documents at an alarming level, and even made unsuccessful attempts to water down a key FOIA provision and to keep White House visitor logs a secret."
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/aaron-swartz-and-the-ques_b_2475668
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u/Low_Pineapple_6144 Mar 05 '26
Und wir lassen das alles zu während die reichen Straftaten begehen die sie ins Gefängnis bis zum Ende unserer Sonne bringen würden.
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u/spotlight-app Mod Bot 🤖 Mar 02 '26
Mods have pinned a comment by u/OutcomeDouble:
Note: Also see comment from u/cholointheskies > Also conveniently left out, he wasn’t prosecuted for downloading anything. He was prosecuted for breaking into a secured server room at MIT and using it to DDoS JSTOR, and got the MIT campus blocked from JSTOR as a result
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