Aaron Swartz was facing up to 35 years for wire fraud and hacking for swiping some JSTOR documents, and the DOJ has done nothing against the AI companies and their IP violating antics.
For good reason. Courts have so far ruled AI training is fair use, and it doesn't look likely to be overturned by the supreme court. Theres also the matter of some labs pirating books to get training data, which is illegal (they lost in civil court), but it's unclear whether that can be criminally prosecuted.
AI companies did quite a bit of uploading while e.g. getting Anna's archive over BitTorrent.
Not necessarily. You can literally turn uploads off and leech torrents.
Did they?
Are you sure?
> Meta’s reasoning is straightforward. Anyone who uses BitTorrent to transfer files automatically uploads content to other people, as it is inherent to the protocol. In other words, the uploading wasn’t a choice, it was simply how the technology works.
https://torrentfreak.com/uploading-pirated-books-via-bittorr...
Especially since it ISN’T an inherent part of a the protocol - just the default of most clients.
Wonder if TF skipping pointing that out was intentional!
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...
2. All the hacking legislation (and criminal law in general) require proving intent, which so far as we can tell didn't exist in those cases. At best you can try some "reckless" or "negligent" angle, but that would a novel legal argument and would be risky to prosecute
No, they don't, see laws that make negligent behavior illegal
Your Honour, it is indeed correct that during testing of our new missile to see if it could correctly function in the military role of seeking out and then breaking through a blast door, the targeting system locked onto the nearby bank vault. We only found out where this particular missile went after the bank contacted us for help in investigating who might have been responsible for the new hole where their door used to be, and if any of our other equipment might help stop such weapons in the future.
We did not expect the test missile to be so effective.
We have contacted independent researchers to help us investigate what went wrong here.
We also agree that we made a lot of mistakes, and that we should have had better tests in place even at the time.
However, we also assert that even if we had had all of those tests in place, the specific actions taken by our "autonomously seek-and-destroy-blast-door" munition would likely have circumvented all the things we could have, and should have, already had in place.Clearly the fact that the end-use is (possibly) fair use isn't the only thing that matters.
He wasn't prosecuted for copyright infringement though.
>... was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA),
A reason. Not the same as a good reason.
The fact that you even point out that they committed illegal acts that would normally get prosecuted, and yet didn't, shows that IP enforcement is very loose depending on who did it.
I specifically differentiated civil law from criminal law in my original comment, and said it's unclear whether their acts were criminal.
We get this "35 year" number from adding up all the counts he faced, taking their maximum sentence. That's just not how sentencing works. Like charges group, and you're sentenced according to the most severe charge.
People cite these numbers in part because DOJ posts them in their press releases. DOJ is in these instances lying. When we amplify those lies, we're doing their work for them.
Here are some useful links. This is an explanation of just how they got those ridiculous numbers like 35 years [1].
There is also often confusion of what he did and what hewas charged with. Here's a two part series going over that [2][3].
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[3] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
Depends alot on the values inputted into such a calculator. See [0] for a solid discussion of what his future could have been (search for "That brings up the important question of how much time Swartz was actually facing"). TLDR, it's certainly not the case that only probation was guaranteed or even particularly likely.
[0] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
If DOJ said to him or to the public potential punishment is 35 years, then yes it is fair to say he was facing that. They cant have it both ways - claim that 35 years is possible outcome to pressure the person and then turn around and be like "nah, that is exaggerated such huge penalties are not a thing".
Seriously, it is 35 years when it suits DOJ and institutions. And it turns into "likely just straight probation" when ... suits DOJ and big companies.
So, we are really getting back to DOJ wants sentences to look super huge so you sign a deal ... but when it is politically inconvenient they suddenly get small.
“The rain falls upon the just
And also on the unjust fellas
But mostly it falls upon the just
Cause the unjust have
the just’s umbrellas.”