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Comment by nz | Hacker News Reader

Funny how, when Aaron Swartz did the exact same thing (in a much narrower and more focused way), he was driven to suicide by the US government, but when Sam and Dario do it, people argue about whether (or not) "IP is real".

Note that society is more about justice than it is about philosophy or logic. Whether you believe that IP makes logical sense or not, is not terribly relevant through the lens of justice. To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not (despite having purer intentions than either -- despite being a genuine utilitarian, instead of an aspiring oligarch _pretending_ to be one), would be the height of injustice.

It would be a grotesque and cruel insult to all the people who remember Swartz, and share his values and optimism about the internet and computers.

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What happened to Swartz was injustice.

Why would I want it to happen to more people? This is, at least to me, an insane point of view.

"Oh my god, the police just shot a black man for no reason. To make this fair they should also shoot more white people for no reason". Do you see how absolutely unhinged that sounds?

The parent comment highlights the double standards, they are not campaigning for pushing people to suicide. This is a strawman.

Yeah, this double standards thing is profoundly unjust.

I disagree.

>To allow the Altmans and Amodeis of the world to escape the kinds of consequences that Swartz could not ... would be the height of injustice.

Simply put, he's demanding two injustices. Let's break this down with a imaginary law.

"If you do not wear your hat you will be beheaded. This includes the poorest man and the king himself".

In OPs definition, this kind of equality is justice. But I do not consider this justice at all, simply equality.

"If you do not wear your hat you will be fined $1. This includes the poorest man and the king himself".

This is something much more close to justice as the punishment fits the crime.

> This is something much more close to justice as the punishment fits the crime.

True, but to put a still finer point on it, still fantastically more harmful to that poorest man than the king.

The real injustice is that the poor man does not have a hat. Whereas the king most likely has a whole room dedicated to them.

Again I agree, this is why some countries have scaling fines. If a rich person gets a speeding ticket they still don't execute them.

We're on the same page.

There are two injustices here. The first injustice is the sheer existence of this notion of intellectual property. The second injustice stems from the selective application of the associated laws.

Intellectual property should not exist, but since it does, one can and should expect it to be applied consistently in all cases. Just look at what they did to Kim Dotcom, he basically got destroyed. SWAT rappelled down helicopters and descended upon this guy for the egregious crime of copying bits. That's exactly what should happen to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Meta. Anything less than that is an insult to previous enforcement victims.

Inconsistency robs authorities of all credibility. Selective enforcement exposes them for the arbitrary tyrants they are and delegitimizes their decisions.

"For my friends, everything. For everyone else, the law."

And

"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect."

It sounds unhinged because it's a straw man.

I usually shit post on this website because it’s full of amoral idiots who just want to make a lot of money and don’t care about others, but I want to suggest to you that arguing using extreme analogies is almost never a persuasive rhetorical device. The other person almost always just sees the way it doesn’t accurately apply to the situation.

I didn't want to bring up Aaron Swartz myself first, but now that you did and proved the point I did not want to post first, I nevertheless will:

It's a cruel and sad irony that people invoke Aaron Swartz to argue directly opposite worldviews depending on prevailing fashion, making him into some kind of perpetuum mobile in his grave. Literally the same arguments, using his memory to argue position that's opposite to what was argued two years ago, back before AI fully took off.

I personally doubt Aaron would be against AI companies doing what they did on the grounds of intellectual property. There's plenty of things to hate about how AI is transforming the world, but this is not it.

The funny thing about having a divine source for rights is also recognizing that humans are fallible and thus inevitably going to be unable to live up to that standard. This argument is the basis for people who want government to have limited powers- the less power it has, the less it can abuse it.

There's a flip side to this as well- President Lincoln famously suspended habeus corpus unilaterally in violation of the Constitution, outright ignoring a Supreme Court ruling in the process. It became moot when Congress retroactively approved the suspension and allowed it to continue for the remainder of the civil war. Lincoln remains celebrated, despite what could rightfully be argued as blatantly unconstitutional power grabs.

reality > rights

The use of the term divine at the time was more of an aftereffect of most people having some kind of belief in god and using that as a casus belli to redistribute power. The actual causal reasons seem more technological and more of England spreading themselves too thin. Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights, it's the distribution of power and information that defines the rights you have. The Constitution is simply a piece of paper, not an agent.

We see this happening again in our modern world. Technology has allowed us to concentrate information like never before. If you believe knowledge (hence processing of information) is power then we've created new power structures that must change society.

Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information" but the other party can simply disagree and say it's my divine right to. You're at an impasse unless you plan on taking up a path to violence (any and every legal action is implied violence).

> Lincoln went on to further prove there is no divine power enforcing these rights,

This is a straw man that nobody is arguing.

> Now, we can say things like "well, you can't concentrate information"

Again, nobody is arguing that "concentrating information" is bad. They're arguing that the expression of ideas in a specific format is a type of property, and that what AI companies are doing is immoral theft. Further, states and the federal government have the means and impetus to prosecute theft according to the powers given them by the Constitution. The only thing that is stopping them from doing so is that the claim that theft has occurred is contested, and the method in question has not been successfully tried in court in the broad.

If people don't want their data stolen, then they should make backups. It's pretty trivial these days to set up.

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