I think people on HN don't fully appreciate the extent to which prosecutors and judges take the law seriously.
On the other hand, a relative is a DA. She has explained how around the holidays, she collaborates with the prosecutor to ram cases through the system or slap people on the wrist and send them home. This way all the noble guardians of the law can take an extra few weeks off between Thanksgiving and Christmas.
I said they were people, and people who had dedicated their lives to the idea of the law. I did not say they were superhuman. They can be wrong and have faulty judgement. In fact, I feel like I went out of my way not to ascribe moral judgement on their worldview; I simply wanted to point out that their worldview exists and shouldn't be ignored if you plan on operating at the frontier of the law.
It's good of you to point out the limitations of that worldview. I don't mean to criticize you. I'm just saying, be careful if you think that a charge of "hypocrisy" is going to help here. The real world is not an Internet message board argument. Lots of prosecutors, all of them riven with human frailties, nonetheless believe passionately in the law. You're not going to talk them out of it.
I am for the most part happy about this. Unlike a lot of HN people, I think that the law by and large serves the common good, and protects the weak far more than the powerful.
(My uncle was/is? an ADA. I didn't hear any stories like this, but didn't ask. Totally believe it though.)
My point is not a charge of hypocrisy, I just think the language you are using imparts a phony gravitas. I'm a systems engineer but I would LOL if I read that someone wrote I "dedicated my life to the spirit of the command line."
Likewise, many lawyers are just in it because it's something they are good at and it pays the bills. Not every lawyer is Harvey Silverglate.
I'm really not trying to impute gravitas. I am being completely serious. These people we're talking about at the DoJ are different people when matters of law come up. They are not kidding around about it.
That doesn't make them granite monuments to justice. But it might mitigate the concern that they're being petty. There is a reasonable narrative here in which Swartz is purposefully causing harm to the social good. I don't really agree with that narrative (based on what we know now), but I can see it.
If it helps, think about pro-life people (I'm pro-choice) and their attitude towards abortion. They are not kidding around about that issue. Do they have a lot of gravitas to you? Maybe not! But they believe human beings are being killed. So I can see where they're coming from, even though I disagree with them.
Yes, in this particular case you are right.
This case is interesting because Aaron is doing this as an "activist" and as such it becomes political-legal theatre. He is friends with a bunch of lawyers and legal researchers who are working at the intersection of IP rights and freedom of information rights.
If he was just some nobody kid in Schaumburg stealing PDFs from Motorola, he'd either be in jail already or slapped on the wrist and sent home. Nobody would have heard about it, and there'd be no internet dialectic about it.
We don't really know if this was an "activist" crime.
It's very possible that he just intended to analyze the documents and publish aggregated results. If that's the case, I think this prosecution is a mistake; an extreme overreaction. Scholarly analysis of JSTOR documents is not a criminal intent. His actions may leave him culpable to a variety of minor crimes, but his impact on the social good is minimal at worst.
On the other hand, it's possible (though less likely, I think) that the intent here was to mirror JSTOR onto BitTorrent. I might sympathize with this goal, but I don't think its prosecution as wire fraud is an overreaction. I'll root for Aaron at trial, though.
The problem with that analysis is that there's nothing criminal (or even illegal) about sharing public domain works over BitTorrent. So whether he copied the documents for personal use or distribution, it was still the initial copying that was at fault.
It's a little like someone broke into a library every night for a few months and scanned a bunch of public domain books.
The only actual crimes are breaking and entering, and using the scanning equipment without authorization. What he intended to do with the scans is irrelevant.
JSTOR's particular collection of documents is protected by copyright and has been valued, by virtually every one of the most learned and respected educational institutions in the country, at millions of dollars annually.
Let's say I come into possession of a trove of public domain documents from the 1800s, and I take the time to scan every one of them painstakingly and from those scans to assemble an academically useful database, for which I charge $100/person/year for access. Your contention is that because the underlying documents are public domain, you are entitled to unfettered access to my work product, despite the fact that I took steps to gate access to my work product.
The law isn't going to see it that way, I don't think. But maybe you're right. I'm not a lawyer.
Like everyone else on HN, I wish all these documents were freely available too.
Copyright protects creative work. If you used creativity (as defined in case law) in choosing documents for your compilation, or got creative with your scanning, then you can claim exclusive rights.
Look for links in the phrase "such scans are often considered uncopyrightable" in the original article for more on this topic.
There is a "collective works" copyright, so I guess -- I am also not a lawyer -- that if one made a copy of some database, it may be infringing on the creator's rights even if the contents of the database consisted solely of public domain works.
>You are free to copy and use individual images but copying and distributing the complete collection may infringe what is known as the “collective works” copyright. Collections of public domain material will be protected if the person who created it has used creativity in the choices and organization of the public domain material. This usually involves some unique selection process, for example, a poetry scholar compiling a book -- The Greatest Poems of e.e. cummings.
I don't think JSTOR is using what could be described as a unique selection process.
I found this comment greyed. How does anyone downvote this? It's a single sentence with two clauses both of which state objectively verifiable facts relevant to the thread and responsive to the parent comment.
People downvote things they don't like, including the truth. They are also generally unable to distinguish between "this is how things are" and "this is how things should be", and will generally downvote as if you'd written the latter.
On the other hand, a relative is a DA. She has explained how around the holidays, she collaborates with the prosecutor to ram cases through the system or slap people on the wrist and send them home. This way all the noble guardians of the law can take an extra few weeks off between Thanksgiving and Christmas.