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Comment by uhno | Hacker News Reader

Not signing off on the plea bargain is precisely the definition of remaining neutral: not influencing the proceedings.

Putting him behind bars for downloading bits is ludicrous, and history will look back on us as living in some sort of dark ages.

Just had to get that out of my system.

>Putting him behind bars for downloading bits is ludicrous

Unless it's your data that's being downloaded unlawfully, right?

Even then. In fact, especially then. I wouldn't be able to stomach taking away even one month of someone's life for words that I wrote.

I'm writing a book. I plan on putting it on piratebay myself. I'll have an option for people to pay me if they so choose.

Wait until you're perhaps older, with children to feed, bills to pay. maybe employees or shareholders that need to see a return.

Well in this case, it's publicly funded research data. US citizens should have easy access to this data since we already paid for it. So yes. It is our data.

"JSTOR told the Chronicle that each and every year, they turn away 150 million attempts to gain access to articles."

Then tell your government to either provide it to the public themselves, or pay someone else to provide it to the public. Either way, funding one half of something and then demanding the rest is ridiculous.

It's not ridiculous to demand public access to public data post Internet, when almost everything is electronic.

Other people and other organizations are willing to provide this data to the public at their cost. However they can't publish data that's under lock and key.

First you shouldn't have to hide under a new throw away account.

Second, since MIT initiated the proceedings I wouldn't call that neutral either.

Given the level of adjectives and expletives that I have seen being used for anyone who has made even the slightest of remarks that don't aligned perfectly with the popular stand here, I can understand uhno's stance of saying stuff from a new account. And yes, it doesn't seem that MIT was neutral on this case. But I guess dropping the case wouldn't have been a neutral stance either.

I think you're confusing HN with reddit. While the comment quality may have gone down a bit from the influx of new users, most people on HN still tend to be courteous. Out of all the comments in multiple stories, I've only seen about 5 bad words give or take which is pretty good considering that a lot of people are probably furious.

Yes, I think the conversation is definitely tamer than the last time we were discussing aaronsw or MIT.

Of course I can be brave and eat downvotes when necessary without a throwaway as I never get to meet, or work with, anyone here IRL who might punch me in the face. But I have to say that even my non-conforming comments are usually left alone by downvoters, as long as I take pains to explain my disagreement.

"First you shouldn't have to hide under a new throw away account."

But you don't know who "you" is so how can you judge that they don't want to hide under a throwaway account?

What if "you" is <person who HN fawns over> or <CEO of HN's latest darling> or <someone nearing the karma point where you get to downvote> or <someone who's feelings are more easily bruised> (Karmaphiliac?)

Would be a nice feature to be able to post a comment which isn't linked to your handle w/o doing a throwaway. Said feature only available above a certain karma level of course.

Add: Or <someone who doesn't want to upset an important co-worker, boss or partner/spouse that reads HN who views things differently>

Going off-subject, I feel that one of the main reasons that HN is really civil compared to other social sites is that not many long standing HN users use throw-aways. If using throw-aways becomes more common, I feel that the comment quality will continue suffer even more, so I'm inclined to call it out when I see it.

since MIT initiated the proceedings I wouldn't call that neutral either.

MIT initiated a process to find out who the laptop they found belonged to. MIT did not initiate any legal proceedings, and did not tell anyone that they were in favor of doing so.

Combined with Jstor's actions, MIT could have stopped this circus at anytime. They didn't.

MIT could have stopped this circus at anytime.

The report gives plenty of evidence that doesn't support that contention. It looks to me like the prosecution didn't care what MIT or JSTOR thought.

Yes but it would probably weaken the prosecution's case at the very least.

it would probably weaken the prosecution's case at the very least

I can see one thing that would have weakened the prosecution's case: if MIT had been able to say definitely that Swartz's access to the MIT network was authorized. However, I'm not sure MIT could have said that definitely.

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