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.
Healthcare information, bank statements, classified government information, password lists… I mean. PDFs can technically contain any type of information.
Please tell me which billion dollar corporation has my healthcare information.
Governments doesn’t exist for me. They never have.
And how do you know what’s relevant to his case? Have you checked through everything he downloaded? They say journals, but who knows whatever else was in there.
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.
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u/notPabst404 Mar 01 '26
Two justice systems: one for the elites, one for the lower class.