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Comment by dehrmann | Hacker News Reader

This post misses a lot of nuance. Aaron Swartz was an activist who did obviously illegal things and got caught and prosecuted. What OpenAI is doing is in legal gray area because it might be transformative enough to be fair use; we just don't know yet.

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Simply being transformative is not sufficient for it to be fair use.

But more to the point if it's deemed illegal Altman won't suffer any personal legal consequences.

It's not about simply not doing something illegal - we all regularly commit crimes that we could be charged with if we piss off the wrong people. When a company does it, it's "disrupting" and heavily rewarded if the company has enough funding or revenue. When people like AS do it, they get destroyed. Selective enforcement in order to maintain the status quo. The last few years have clearly shown that if you are wealthy enough, the rules do not apply to you.

If OpenAI had run its company by hiding their hardware around a university campus they would have gotten in trouble too. It is not as much about the scraping as it’s the the part where MIT sees a masked person sneaking into backrooms hiding equipment that got AS in trouble. And of cause that he literally disrupted service to jstor because he did a poor job of scraping it. He could have gotten through all of this if he had appeared less like a cyber terrorist in his execution of his plan, but of cause he though he wouldn’t get caught doing it, so he never considered how it would look if he did.

No, we don't. We are not criminals, unlike blackhat hackers, data horders, CIA affiliated companies (meta, google) or the typical big company sociopathic fraudster.

By US copyright law, OpenAI is engaged in illegal conduct. The fact that they haven't been punished for it doesn't mean it's magically not illegal.

It's possible copyright law will be revised to make it unambiguously legal to do what they've done, but that's not how the law works right now.

> By US copyright law, OpenAI is engaged in illegal conduct.

What makes you so sure about this? You are not a judge, and multiple cases against OpenAI have been dismissed by judges already.

Dismissing a case doesn't mean that the conduct in question is legal. Not sure why you would think it does.

OpenAI did not break and enter into private premises to obtain such data.

This is the crime that took place, it was not just a copyright issue.

Aaron having broken and entered doesn't mean that OpenAI violating copyright law is legal.

Who would ever come up with such an assumption?

(excluding regular users of Fentanyl)

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