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Reply to @feld@friedcheese.us
G@stark@mastodon.mit.edu (2026-08-22 08:47:43)
@feld @n_dimension a that just begs the question. Was there a violation of the terms of service? Was there a theft?
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Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95@feld@friedcheese.us (2026-08-22 08:58:38)
@stark @n_dimension yes, that's exactly the point. He was violating the ToS of JSTOR.

Aaron felt that all of these research papers behind paywalls / university logins should be public domain. So he was downloading a copy of everything to publish it openly. Which was very much illegal as he did not own the rights to that research.

Was much of this research at least partially funded with taxpayer dollars and should be open to the public? Yeah, and that would be nice, but that's not how things are. We've got to pass laws to change that. You can't just steal and publish the data and expect the entire system will throw up their hands and accept this as the new norm.

I am very sympathetic to Snowden for uncovering crimes against Americans and getting us that classified information. Government should not be able to hide crimes against its own citizens as classified information.

Absolutely zero sympathy for Aaron for trying to be a hero though.

https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.pdf

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Blurry Moon@sun@shitposter.world (2026-08-22 09:02:06)
@feld @n_dimension @stark Swartz was scraping so fast it was causing availability problems for on-campus legitimate users, that was how he got caught and a big factor in why they went after him. If you think about it it's very similar to (legitimate) complaints about aggressive AI scrapers knocking out sites and raising maintenance costs.