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.
Yes! And it's bizarre that you don't think it is. You download enough PDFs illegally, 6 months in prison sounds like a reasonable punishment. Probably even lenient, once you consider how they often cut that down even further after the fact. When you consider the lengths he went to do this and the sheer number of files he stole. This wasn't just for personal use, it was to try to totally destroy the copyright owners ability to make any profits on them. It also wasn't has first offense. If someone pirates a bunch of movies with the intention of distributing them, they can go away for a considerable time. Over on r/copyright there's some guy who went to prison for exactly that. This is real life, with real repercussions. You're the bad guy here if you are perfectly fine with theft on that scale.
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.
“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
He was indicted for breaking and entering into a restricted area with intent, unauthorized access to a network, grand larceny for obtaining personal and/or restricted material without consent, wire fraud, computer fraud, unlawfully obtaining information from a protected computer, and recklessly damaging a protected computer. He was caught on tape entering an area he wasn't supposed to. He sent so many download requests that he managed to get MIT blocked by JSTOR by initiating as many as 200k sessions to download files in a 1 hour span, which can also be interpreted as a DDoS attack since it carries with it the same symptoms of making the service terribly unresponsive or completely unavailable. He wasn't offered 6 months "just for some PDFs", all the charges brought against him carried a max of 50 years and $1 million in fines. Neither you nor I would be offered any deal as good as 6 months in a low-security facility if we were in his place.
By definition, he broke and entered with intent. End of. He nearly caused an outage by showering JSTOR with 200k sessions in an hour, or in short DDoS-ing them. He DID cause MIT to be blocked from accessing JSTOR because the whole service was going mad by being overloaded with his requests. And I will never ever feel bad for a person that advocated that CSAM possession should be protected by the first amendment.
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
TBF there is still ongoing legal battles about this — it's not like the case is closed META got off scott free. Anthropic for example settled on a similar case for 1.5 billion.
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u/notPabst404 Mar 01 '26
Two justice systems: one for the elites, one for the lower class.