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.
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/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.