Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence(blog.curiousquail.com) |
Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence(blog.curiousquail.com) |
RIP Aaron.
Not for the money per se, but for... like... "protection".
I mean, of course they're not going to sue Meta (or the other big AI players), but if you're a startup, it probably helps to have someone with influence as an investor so maybe authorities would give your company some slack.
These are two party states, the people are given two polarising choices and can only choose one. Party 1 gets in and does what the deep-state says, then people get angry and vote Part 2. Party 1 changes leader and says we are better now.
Party 2 does what the deep-state wants, and people run back to Party 1.
It's an illusion of choice. There is no democracy.
If we think back to the various lawsuits Facebook has gone through, they paid out about $10 or so per individual affected, totaling a few hundred million dollars, which they would make in a couple months for selling user data and whatnot.
This is something that every company gets away with mainly I think because of just how large their wealth actually is. It’s difficult to actually punish a machine that acts almost like infrastructure. Punishing an individual is easy.
I don’t know if there’s really a solution at this point, maybe we could’ve prevented this reality at some point in the past but I don’t think that without actual global collapse it would be something that can be retroactively changed, and I don’t know if global collapse would necessarily lead to a better future.
I think that for one, Zuckerberg should be in prison, if someone oversees a massive theft like this, I think they should be held criminally liable. Same the CEOs of Anthropic and OpenAI for their parts in the massive theft that took place. They should all be doing prison time.
The reason I don’t think they will is that their investors probably have a good amount of leverage over anyone who would prosecute them, so it would never make it that far.
It's not at all. There is zero reason this couldn't be applied to Zuck. [0] There's also no reason why fines couldn't be 10% of global revenue, or more.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/business/evergrande-found...
There’s a ton of money at stake for the weathly aristocrats. They push politicians to delay or do things in favor of the companies above the people, and like I already said punishment is hard specifically because how do you fine someone with infinite money? They will just get more.
That’s not a punishment. I think that personal liability to the actual CEOs is the only way to get around this, leadership is generally never held responsible which means they can do whatever they want and the company bails out their greedy decisions.
It’s late stage capitalism and there’s no clear answer at least from my vantage point. Maybe if plug it into Claude it will give us a more coherent answer.
Also, due to the very stupid way the DoJ calculates potential sentences in their press releases, almost everyone thinks defendants are facing much more prison time than they actually have any remotely realistic chance of receiving. Here's an article on that [3].
Briefly, if some hypothetical criminal committed some specific crime in the worst way possible, hitting many of the checkmarks that make it worse (such underage victim, victim is a law or government official or relative of one, victim was restrained, hate crime, terrorism, organized crime was involved, they were a manager or supervisor in that organized crime, they abuse a position of trust, they used a minor to help with the crime, they used threats to impede the investigation, they committed reckless endangerment while fleeing arrest, and the crime was committed while they were out on bond or bail from another federal crime) and could get a sentence of N years then N years is what the DoJ states in the press release.
Doesn't matter that the actual person being charged has none of those, or that they have some of the circumstances that can lower sentences (such as acceptance of responsibility, only minor involvement, helped investigating or prosecuting another person, diminished capacity, they self reported their crime before authorities discover it, they were coerced into participating, and some more) and there's basically no chance they will get anything more than maybe a few months of parole...it is going to say N years in the press releases.
Actually, it might even say some multiple of N, because they often charge the person with multiple things based on the same underlying harm. For example if you kill one person that might be first degree murder, second degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter.
They might charge you with all of those (which does make sense--they are going to try to prove all the elements of first degree murder, but if they fail to prove of them they might still prove the elements of one of the others). If the jury comes back and convicts on several of them all but the most severe one will be used for sentencing. But the DoJ press release will probable make it sounds like you could serve N years for each of them.
It's completely ridiculous. They have the details of what they are charging the person with. They know about all those factors that increase or decrease sentences. They could do the math and give a realistic sentence in the press release.
[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] https://volokh.com/2013/01/16/the-criminal-charges-against-a...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
Rather than making others suffer to balance things out, removing suffering on the other side has the same effect.
And furthermore their trackers have always been the most malignant. Stories of "Facebook basically ddosed my site to train their LLMs"
He was offered a plea deal of 6 months in jail. Which he turned down. And then he killed himself - something which he attempted multiple times in the past when he wasn't being prosecuted for anything
Basically if you are sufficiently big, you can get away with any crime (by making it legally non-crime).
most people do the time
where the orange infant calls datacenters "beautiful" and now is arranging to give them federal land to build on to get around all the protests
while at the same time calling solar and wind turbines ugly and loud and giving billions to companies already contracted to NOT build them
it's all the irony of wild greed and infinite corruption, if only Aaron could have seen this future
Democracy doesn't make sense anymore, unfortunately; nobody has any ideas who they're voting for... Photos can be faked, videos can be faked, candidates can be pre-selected during primaries. Worse than that; each individual is shown different facts so nobody even agrees on the basic facts. So literally people are voting for constructed, imaginary individuals who don't exist outside of their heads. Also, there are too many people voting for too few representatives. This guarantees poor representation.
The legal system should be replaced by some kind of vigilante justice hybrid like in the old Roman system were people would be exonerated for taking revenge on just grounds. It's impossible for the legal system to be fair anyway. The closest to justice we can achieve is through decentralization.
IMO, the role of government is to dismantle any large organisations which compete against it for power and control and shield individuals against those organisations.
In some countries the excuse is lamer than in others. But, in the end, everywhere in the world money always speaks louder.
But BigCo can grease a few palms and do 10x more and the useful idiots will screech about how responsible they're being by installing those stupid stream spreader things on their parking lot culverts and putting up a few birdhouses to please the local commissioner.
What happened to Aaron Swartz is little different.
They have already done the legal work and the math in advance, and because the numbers are on their side they get away with it.
Is as simple as that.
― Honore de Balzac
Because they smell really nice?
This is not true. From the prosecutor's testimony:
there was never an intention for him to go to jail for longer than a three, four, potentially five-month range.Furthermore this whole post is using Aaron as a strawman to further the argument that big corporations = bad. While its true that the very nature of a big corporation is to minmax (gaming term if you are unfamiliar) with the max being profit and min being everything else, they are not inherently evil and the argument is an over simplification of a much larger more complex situation. Anyone who simply believes they inherently bad shouldn't be posting online because all of the hardware and services required to do so demonstrates their complacency in contributing to these large corporations and makes them a hypocrite.
Or do we think that the prosecution was correct, apologize ourselves for any protests we might have voiced against the prosecution and demand similar prosecution of Meta and everyone who continues to torrent “Linux ISOs”?
Personally I agree that the prosecution was unjust, and so I find it to be a good thing that the stranglehold of excessive copyright is being weakened by the new AI moment. But that also why I find the sudden turn to copyright maximalism that seems to have taken over large parts of the tech industry so baffling. Why are we wasting our time pretending we want Meta prosecuted rather than spending our efforts ensuring that all these products that come out of this massive blending of human creative outputs are owned collectively by us all with no such recourse to the same copyright laws that they so valiantly shattered?
As to the latter, I think a mixture of commodification and the almost Pavlovian conditioning produced by corporate social media explains both its attraction and its resilience in the face of more democratic and emancipatory alternatives.
But what is the actual actionable result we want? That's what I'm asking. There's a lot of anger around all of this, and this isn't the first time we've seen this comparison to Aaron Swartz in all the discourse around that. But these sorts of angry "look at the hypocrisy" rants all seem very muddled in what they're asking for. Because on the one hand they're saying that this prosecution was an injustice and should never have happened, but on the other hand they seem to be asking for similar prosecutions and consequences in different cases where the defendant isn't as popular or likable. When we say we want Zuckerberg to "bear some personal responsibility for the consequences" in respect to meta potentially violating copyright, are we asking for him to be prosecuted like Swartz was? Are we asking for him to be personally sued by publishers instead of them suing Meta? And what is the outcome from this "personal responsibility" that we want? If we're asking for him to be prosecuted, are we asking for that because we actually think he should be convicted, and thus also saying we think Swartz' prosecution was justified? Or are we wanting prosecution for something we don't actually think is a crime, because we want to inflict some form of indirect and symbolic revenge on Zuckerberg for the multitude of other reasons we don't like him?
We should absolutely invoke the injustice that was the Swartz prosecution. What I don't think we should be doing is invoking it as some sort of vague demand for more prosecutions of that type against "the right people".
Much different than scraping web content from the Internet.
Must be any day now
Like common. You know full well that large companies can commit staggering amounts of fraud.
What does the claim that large companies can commit large frauds have to do with anything?
There was little for the government to lose in the case. In a case vs Meta, at the scale it has reached, it could have wide ranging economic implications limiting the investment in AI, which the US is absolutely not willing to pursue at this point in time (or possibly ever).
Basically, being a rich public company provides legal advantages when the US government has similar goals.
The whole thing is incredibly sad and exposes the hypocrisy of the US court system and government as a whole.
RIP Aaron.
Edit: As someone that has done both state and fed time, the thing that makes me the saddest here is that the charges would have been drastically reduced if not dismissed and his appeals would have had a high probability of success. They use this "scare tatic" so much and I understand why it works; the possibility of facing those years is terrifying. I don't mean that in any demeaning manner, 25/26 and never having done time I cannot imagine how terrified he must have been.
Edit: I would also like to bring attention to the fact that M. Zuckerberg aggressively pursues these types of cases against people for doing far less than he has done.
The real issue is selective enforcement of the law. If it applied equally to everyone, then more people would be outraged as it affected them.
Reminds me of Marx's 1870 letter to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt:
Every industrial & commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps ... The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life ... regards himself as a member of the ruling nation & consequently becomes a tool of the English [ruling class] against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination [over his own self]. He cherishes religious, social, & national prejudices against the Irish worker ...
The Irishman ... sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.
This antagonism is artificially kept alive & intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power.
... The antagonism between Englishmen & Irishmen ... enables the governments of [the US & England], whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.
MIT then helped the criminal prosecution even after JSTOR settled with him.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/07/mit-aarons-swartz-case...
https://swartz-report.mit.edu/docs/report-to-the-president.p...
I get that MIT's police were meant to join him in a chorus of "Information wants to be free", but let's not act like it's unreasonable to want someone arrested or prosecuted who was not authorized to be in an equipment closet with their computer wired into a switch.
The case ultimately did not help her in her run for governor of MA.
An "Army of lawyers", no less than 6 top lawyers appeared in the courtroom that day representing Cohen (he did not appear), as a "shot across the bow" message to the US Government that Cohen was prepared to spend a vast sum of his wealth to defend himself and make it a huge undertaking for the government if they wished to proceed.
Lawyers present for Cohen:
Peter Nussbaum: SAC Capital's General Counsel, who entered the plea.
Theodore "Ted" Wells Jr.: Renowned partner from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
Martin Klotz: Partner at Willkie Farr & Gallagher and Cohen's personal attorney.
Michael Schachter, Daniel Kramer, and Michael Gertzman: Senior litigation partners assisting the defense.
Because the defense consisted of prominent partners from multiple top-tier firms simultaneously, analysts famously calculated that the collective group was costing SAC Capital roughly $10,000 an hour (mere pocket change for a successful hedge fund guy).
Owner of the New York Mets now, by the way, which maybe non-sports following readers will be happy to hear remain a boondoggle. He tried very hard to spend his way to glory, leading the league in payroll at the beginning of the 2025 season, only to crash and burn and end up in last place this season.
If you want to know how and why it is like this, read Perkin's books (atm I'm reading "The New Confessions of an Economic Hit Man"). It's why Meta will not get sued but Aaron was, and it is why ships are now lining up in front of the Panama canal paying as much as 400k for a crossing with little of that wealth making it to the people of Panama.
It does, but it's not like that's new information to minority communities.
Under capitalism money and power are inextricably linked. Your influence in a democracy is tied directly to your access to capital.
This is why expensive elections are are desire of those funding Super-pacs. The more elections cost, the fewer people decide them.
Aaron didn’t matter because he was poor. Had he been named Musk, or Zuckerberg, he would suffer the consequences they do when they break the law which is zero.
This is how capitalism is supposed to work and does.
You can’t have capitalism is being rich doesn’t confer privilege in every area including the legal system. It’s why American oligarch can safely “ask forgiveness not permission”. The risk to them personally is nil.
Who in the government bureaucracy made the decision and followed through? It's sad that we've become accustomed to accept governments/corporations as entities by themselves when they clearly aren't.
An alternative would be the CEO to be the “legal person” of each Corp. and be the one against all legal actions should be targeted.
In that case it would Zack himself the one facing any legal action.
A Corp’s actions result to the death of a person. CEO should be trialed as if they were the one driving the car.
This has always been the case. It's why lots of us who came up in the 80s and 90s embraced the "fuck corporations" and "information wants to be free" zeitgeist of the times.
It's also why the corporate bootlicking on this site is so grating at times. IDK, maybe I'm the only one but it seems like the veneer has worn off and over the last couple years I've realized HN is "special", not because of the reasons its proponents will recite but because it's where you come to post about the interesting technical challenges you solved while designing a system that goes down to the corner store and buys Hitler a pack of his favorite smokes and everyone laps that up.
Aaron attracted influential and creepy people and was ill-equipped to handle it. He was also working through a period of sexual awakening while being used by older people to advance their agendas. Little of it would meet contemporary standards of appropriate behavior given his physical and psychological state. I spent some time with him before this went down and was horrified by what I saw.
I was not in a position to help him address his mental health, nor in the right physical location to have positive influence, which is what was needed. Then he cracked under the pressure of this and nobody could get through. This was obvious to all involved at the time and that's the part of the prosecution that still makes no sense to me, from all institutions involved. They all have blood on their hands.
It's not hard to find continuing bad behavior by individuals near him at the time. I've given up on them being held accountable. Let the child rest.
I’m not saying he should or shouldn’t have been prosecuted, but there’s some kind of rose tinted glasses filter around what happened with Aaron, like he just was browsing the web and was suddenly prosecuted. He repeatedly broke in to a physical room and kept changing his MAC address to dodge bans. At least report it with its full context.
Aaron Swartz was punished because he disrespected a business model. All the kids sued by the MAFIAA were punished because they disrespected a business model. Copyright was merely the mechanism to make it stick. But AI companies and Meta can disrespect copyright all they want, because in their case, it serves a corporate business model, and those hurt or disenfranchised by it are regular people or much smaller companies.
The law doesn't exist to protect the weak from the powerful, but to enable the powerful to punish the weak.
We desperately need to find better ways to pay creators, and it's good that they've managed to put copyright law to some non-nefarious use towards that end. But they deserve something that actually meets their needs, which copyright law does not.
Exactly. And what's more, it's a business model, keeping behind paywalls scientific papers that we the public have already paid for once with our tax dollars, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.
Lots of people have a vested interest in civil structure, from the poor to the rich. Everyone would be worse off if the US looked like Haiti.
That said, people benefit in different amounts from the system at Large, and lose or benefit from Individual policies
RIP Aaron.
Link to the full archive:
http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/fullarchive
Link to the out of order post:
It's possible the JSTOR charges were in some way motivated by the earlier PACER incident
In the JSTOR case he installed a python script on his own laptop, connected it to MIT's network and left the script running for months
In the PACER case, the computer he used did not belong to him. It was a government computer in a federal building primarily used by lawyers. He installed a perl script on the government's computer and left it running for weeks
It does not appear he ever asked anyone for permission to do this
It's surprising he avoided CFAA charges for the PACER incident
Did he exceed authorized access to a "protected computer"
For purposes of the CFAA it does not matter if the documents were public information
Perhaps there are libraries that welcome patrons installing scripts on their publicly accessible computers without permission, then leaving the scripts running on their networks, downloading 1000's of documents
Maybe MIT would not care. But there is every reason to believe the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals would care
This is not to suggest he deserved his fate, only that the PACER incident mattered. Perhaps more than the JSTOR one
The blog author does not mention it
What happened 'so fast' was how fast they pulled off the mask. 10 years and it's practically off in its entirety...
> 'Two ways', Mike said. 'Gradually and then suddenly'.
I think a lot of folks are stuck on the idea that it's been a singular bad actor -- a Trump, or a McConnell or something. This "Great Man Theory" is almost certainly a very naive read of the systems that are leading to this moment.
In this case it looks like there would not be enough material even for a thin paperback.
God can we have an alien invasion already please
If you look at all the much publicized piracy trials around the Napster era, they invariably came down to the defendant distributing the works they downloaded.
This explains why the AI giants are legally fine doing what they're doing. They are explicitly not distributing copies of the work they acquired (although Meta apparently torrented some stuff, which seeds i.e. distributes data by default, and so might be in trouble to that extent) and training AI has so far been ruled to be fair use. Which, technically, makes sense; encoding patterns gleaned from billions of texts into weights is clearly different from distributing exact copies, and if you look at the cases where LLMs can be made to regurgitate content verbatim, it only really works for a handful of extremely popular books.
This also explains how whatever happened with Aaron Swartz, as tragic as it was, is qualitatively different from what is happening with LLMs. He very explicitly scraped all that content with the specific intention of distributing it. On the other hand, AI companies are literally destroying mountains of books to comply with the law.
You could call this tragic on multiple levels, but not hypocritical.
It's hard to imagine a world where Aaron is still around, and he is not a huge fan of LLMs. He'd probably be writing software to make local inference as accessible as possible. I have personally made the same parallel between the treatment of Aaron and the behavior of modern AI studios, but I believe the better conclusion to arrive at is that we should abolish copyright, since it is a fundamentally unjust system designed by people in power, for people in power. Not that we should be litigiously bullying AI scientists into suicide the same way as was done to Aaron.
It would be petty and counterproductive to do it just for consistency of enforcing the wrongness.
How the world has always worked, sadly, ha.
It's hard to put a definition on "unfair", but we all recognise it when we see it. That's why the case of Aaron Swartz is so very visceral for most of us.
This isn't possible when you break into a computer room and steal their files.
The mental gymnaistics people go through to support an asshole that just did what he felt like and wouldn't work witin the system is astounding.
Aaron Swartz should have started a company that supported the free flow of journalim/information.
Instead, he chose to act like a child and steal it instead.
While his death is tragic, he's not someone we should be supporting.
We need to repeal anti-circumvention laws, and yes, it means we might legally be able to do to Meta and its likes what they've been doing to all of us
Meta is accused of civil copyright infringement.
Very different things.
He took his own life.
There is no doubt the government put him in an uncomfortable position, but his story is a gross and tragic outlier. It's hard to draw any patterned conclusions from it, especially because we'll never know how the case would have worked out had Swartz not exited the judicial process.
Also: https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2013/01/noam-chomsk...
i wasn't there and i didn't know him, but talking about a 26 year old man like this makes it seem like you're just taking away his autonomy
Citation please
I can see why it's difficult, but I think your post provides some much-needed context.
I just had a friend commit suicide last week and have been feeling the same, if only I was there. Another friend (a mental health nurse) shared this:
"Fortunately or unfortunately I don't think we can hold ourselves responsible responsible for the decisions of others"
A room with an unlocked and unmarked door, off of a hallway that was open to the general public. An INCREDIBLY tame act compared to other unprosecuted trespasses normalized and celebrated at https://hacks.mit.edu/.
> rotated his MAC address
Not a crime; in fact now a widespread and default practice for consumer Wi-Fi/Bluetooth devices.
Intent matters. Plugging your laptop into a router you normally don't have access to, with intent to download a large number of private articles, means something. And it means more than "I downloaded a lot of public files off the public internet," which is what Meta did.
All of this is in the indictment, which is worth reading: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/217117-united-states...
Personally I think it's a shame that digital crimes can result in prison time at all, except for e.g. crypto theft. But under US law, Aaron committed a crime back then, and it would still classify as a crime today.
Over the course of months they tried all kinds of blocking methods that would stop most people, but he kept evading them. It is impossible that he did not know his use of the free access was no longer authorized.
Then he put his equipment on their wired network, which he had no permission to do so and had to trespass to do that. It is irrelevant that the door was unlocked and in a hallway the public could get to. It being unmarked just makes it worse, since doors the public is supposed to use generally are marked.
He also repeatedly came back to that room to check his equipment.
He was now grabbing data at such a high rate that JSTOR cut off all MIT JSTOR access for a few days while they tried to figure out what do next.
At that point MIT research is being disrupted. MIT does a lot of government research and what was going on was indistinguishable at that point from a hostile attack, and police were called.
This was overzealous prosecution after the affected party got their remedy.
The rate of JSTOR content retrieved from MIT was a separate contract issue.
About technical countermeasures to evade blocking.. you realize that everybody that does scraping at a large scale employs those, right? Including Meta
Specially nowadays where large swaths of the web is behind captchas
Being that it was on a campus, they can sometimes use that as an aggravating factor. I remember one case where a homeless person had a key for a vending machine and took out $30 in quarters, but since the land the vending machine was on was owned by a university he was sentenced to 12 years in prison. One of the few cases that got reversed for a constitutionally exceptional sentence.
> rotated his MAC address
Do you really think these details drastically change how people should judge his actions vs those of a corporation?
And corporate scrapers never ever use proxy pools to rotate IPs to evade throttling and blacklisting. Meta is also scraping illegal content, such as pirated books. So I'm not sure what your argument is.
While I think there are a lot of good arguments that the prosecution was excessive and meant to create a chilling effect, it is a huge leap to say they assassinated him. He was clearly already vulnerable when this happened, or he would have never resorted to taking his own life when there were still so many avenues before him to try to get out of the situation. While this does not make it any less tragic, it does make it a lot less of an 'assassination'.
I don't find it rhetorically useful to use language like that in these situations. It distracts from the real issues at hand.
I can barely imagine facing a whole year. I can't imagine facing five.
If there is a point to be made from what you're talking about, it's about how threats of inhumane prison sentences are used to eliminate our right to trial by jury.
I do not think we need that. With Climate Change a huge reckoning and leveling is coming. The way things look now, in 50 to 100 years there is a very good chance this civilization will probably come to an end.
As for Aaron, I hope the people who went after him can be sued for wrongful death. With meta doing the exact same thing, even to the same MIT Sites, I think a case exist.
Not sure if Chinese propaganda got you or what.
They did 100,000,000 forced abortions, killed tens of thousands of their own people and covered it up.
The United States kills 4 of their own people and the news outlets go wild.
[1] - https://www.heise.de/news/Rechtsverletzende-Kopien-vom-NEINh...
Not true. Copyright infringement is a civil infraction, but can escalate to a criminal infraction at high enough scale, but that's a judgment call.
Aaron Swartz was the victim of a witch hunt, plain and simple. The prosecutor that came after him (Carmen Ortiz) has never suffered any negative consequences for coming after him in such an injust way. She should.
I don't think it's a judgment call, the level to escalate seems to be pretty specific and at an extremely low scale, specifically unauthorized distribution "of at least 10 copies OR 1 or more copyrighted works with a retail value > $2,500" and the penalties are pretty severe, including imprisonment for "up to 5 years and fined up to $250,000, or both."
https://www.justice.gov/archives/jm/criminal-resource-manual...
I'd say Aaron Swartz had crossed that bar pretty thoroughly.
ideally, we would see a stronger legal reaction to the biggest IP heist in history but clearly it's not what's happening. it's only natural for people to criticize the current system until a change for the better materializes, while doing so draw attention to extreme cases such as Aaron's.
Aaron Swartz's case was actually neither -- you could say he wanted to "liberate" information for the "public good" -- but unfortunately the law has no provision for that and all his actions were consistent with how the law specifies the bad actor case, which is what escalated things drastically.
This is what happens when they do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
> Between 1999 and 2015, more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft, fraud and false accounting based on faulty Horizon data, with about 700 of these prosecutions carried out by the Post Office. Other subpostmasters were prosecuted but not convicted, forced to cover illusory shortfalls caused by Horizon with their own money, or had their contracts terminated. The court cases, criminal convictions, imprisonments, loss of livelihoods and homes, debts, and bankruptcies led to stress, illness and family breakdowns, and were linked to at least thirteen suicides.
Hundreds of innocent people went to prison, were financially ruined, thirteen took their own life, because a well-funded entity found it easier to privately prosecute its contractors than to question its software vendor. And the court system let them do it.
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/fujitsu-allowed-bid-govern...
> Second, this Article demonstrates that the government monopoly on prosecution is an ideology rather than a rule. As it turns out, the government has never had total control over criminal law enforcement—not even exclusive authority to charge someone with a crime. While some courts prohibited private prosecution in the nineteenth century, others refused to abolish the practice. Public prosecutions of felonies and federal offenses became the norm in the progressive era, but private prosecution persisted in various forms. Particularly in “lowly” municipal courts, private individuals retained the ability to file and litigate criminal cases.
-- The Past and Persistence of Private Prosecution, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5210126
They can then do one of two things. They can either continue running it if it’s in the interests of justice to do so (public interest, reasonable prospects of success etc), or they can shut it down, as they tend to do for sovereign citizen nonsense and the like.
It was less bizarre when they were all private companies, but now many are owned by the government!
Some of them have successfully prosecuted people over a £0 difference in fare
My point is both Aaron was trying to make the journals public and Meta made models that encapsulate data from the journals public.
All and any fact should be up for discussion. For example, the black community; my community has a serious problem with violence that has caused increased police presence as it spilled out and impacted other communities. We can discuss the why but the fact exist and its up for discussion.
All discussion of the conditions which allow situations like this to occur are shut down and labeled an ism, ist etc...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Cost_of_...
Doctorow, Kottke and others didn't seem to think it was odd that a 14 year old was being flown around the country without his parents present. They pre-gamed at a house instead of a bar because Aaron was too young; the host, then nearly twice his age, later dated him. Didn't end well. And then things really didn't end well.
Epstein made his first contribution to MIT that same year (2002). Lessig arranged for Joi Ito to meet Aaron a year later. According to MIT, Joi Ito met Epstein for the first time one month after Aaron died in 2013.
In the most charitable reading of the situation, Aaron was robbed of his childhood.
wire fraud
computer fraud
unlawfully obtaining info from a protected computer
recklessly damaging a protected computer
aiding and abetting
criminal forfeiture
https://web.archive.org/web/20130608041804/https://www.wired...
Here is a comment that makes a similar point to yours, but in a constructive manner: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49379992
Does that require changing some other things? Absolutely. Would it be hard to convince people to try? Probably (I'm guessing HN crowd won't like this comment, considering it unreasonable.) Has it been a suggested way to organize society for almost 200 years with a long and well argued set of principles behind it? Sure enough!
OK doomer
I dont think anyone bought the judge or prosecutor for Aaron
If we consider campaign financing and lobbying, I don't think it's a stretch to believe that almost any outcome can be bought in the US if there's enough money involved.
> The primary purpose behind copyright law is to foster the creation and dissemination of works for the benefit of the public. By granting authors the exclusive right to authorize certain uses of their works, copyright provides economic incentives to create new works and to make them available in the marketplace.
https://www.uspto.gov/ip-policy/copyright-policy/copyright-b...
In theory this is why they have to be licensed but in practice that consistently leads to the profession capturing the licensing board and using it for protecting the providers rather than the customers.
I find it near impossible, even as someone with a lot of legal knowledge, to tell whether a lawyer I hire is going to advocate zealously and correctly and comprehensively on my part once I hand over my retainer. They all talk a great game.
Problem is, the pay out from the government for their services is atrocious, so not many are willing to go onto the list. And the ones who are, aren't the good ones.
My duty solicitor on the day of my arrest kept making comment that he believed I committed the accused offence (I didn't). Mostly because he didn't understand it it, so that's proof enough it seems.
He then sent me a letter outlining what he understood, which outright stated he believed I did it (again, I didn't). Dropped him like a hot stone when I got charged, and paid for my own. Who after some research was actually half-good.
Then the barrister I had at trial said "You'll likely go down, the judge you have is a bastard, and has sent a lot down", great..
And now when I'm trying to get some reconciliation for all this nonsense. The legal firm I hired to sue, are ignoring my instructions and went for something entirely different and offering a whopping £1000 compensation.
My legal costs alone were many times that
lmao have you realized how absurd such numbers are (even though I'd assume the 100,000,000 can only be a hyperbole, or are you actually serious with it? Having a single child policy for a long while is not the same as "forced abortion" if that's what you're referring to. The thing called "contraceptives" exists) if you use your common sense for just a second?
Seems that it's you who got fed a lot of propaganda unfortunately.
And yes there have been a lot of disasters throughout the history, even not so long ago (e.g. Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution etc.), but if you're suggesting that's what the current regime is doing in 2026, you have no clue.
Also, it's important to note that Fujitsu didn't prosecute anyone, they just lied to the Post Office, lied to subpostmasters, remotely altered evidence, gave false testimony in court, etc. It was the Post Office itself that prosecuted its own subpostmasters.
And then Marx calls this a criticism of "capitalism" even though it's fundamentally a generic criticism of what happens when you centralize political power and then allow special interests to divide people into camps.
The instrument of Limited Liability exists to encourage business formation and risk taking for small businesses to kick off.
The way large corporations and rich individuals would structure their projects into a number of corporation-owned LLCs is an obvious gap being addressed in law systems throughout the world.
> JSTOR,founded in 1995, was and continued to be a United States-based, not-for-profit organization that provides an online system for archiving and providing access to academic journal.
If it was online, could any one have access to it? So why him downloading them was breaking the law?
MIT and Jstor had a bunch of incident response going on, and it isn’t a leap to consider Jstor would cut them off for good if the situation went unresolved.
The OP's blog post is about how the law isn't applied equally in the United States. Aaron was an individual and an easy target for the overzealous prosecutor. Meta's a faceless corporation, guilty in the court of public opinion, and they don't even get a timely investigation because they have the money to tie up the broken legal system indefinitely.
Aaron was an example - if you're small enough, you will be caught, tried, and punished in whatever way we see fit to prove that the justice system "works". If you're a billionaire, do whatever you want wink wink.
I do believe it is not as clear cut though — taking it to an extreme, imagine you directly invested in Epstein's sexual abuse business but only as minority owner. Should you be held liable or not? Now let's extend that to a pyramid scheme lending business. Or a company using child labour? When can we claim immunity and when not?
Changing your IP isn't a crime, even if it has the effect of making attribution to Meta more difficult.
The thing with Aaron was that it went on for months to the point JSTOR's complaints had activated MIT's organizational antibodies, let's say, and the IS department was turned loose to investigate repeatedly. They went to the trouble of upgrading their load balancers and traffic analysis to narrow it down and installed a camera. At that point, the hook was firmly set and with digital and video evidence, the Secret Service had him red-handed abusing MIT.
Keep in mind the thing that spiraled out of control was how Aaron (mis)used MIT resources persistently and with overwhelming evidence - in the end, the civil part with JSTOR was largely irrelevant. MIT called in the big guns with the FBI and Secret Service, and they ate it up. I'm not arguing in favor of it, I'm just familiar with the zeal they bring once they get on a trail.
To borrow your words, intent matters.
Also why are we acting as if Meta wasn’t doing this for over half a decade and that companies don’t actively take steps to try and prevent piracy?
The prosecution offered 6 months in low security in a plea deal.
He had been mass downloading and evading them at MIT for months until he had MIT and FBI involved and was finally caught on camera.
I bring this up because A. maximum exposure to charges are rarely applied but makes great headlines for outrage and B. the plea deal seems reasonable to someone who was unreasonably persistent in the details of the case.
That's the racket. Getting any jailtime for "mass downloading" is a severe penalty, but that gets turned into the carrot because the stick is so unreasonably disproportionate.
John Kiriakou talks often about his own lawyers showing up at his house to convince him to take the deal. And then ending up in a higher security prison.
https://youtu.be/b-wc8tRNoJk?t=980 Has some context around what went down with him going to jail in case one is unaware.
and if you pay up to the mafia then they generally don't kill your relatives, but they still threaten to kill your relatives. I feel like they're only on the book as a means of intimidation. It doesn't feel like a healthy justice system, especially given its a non-violent crime in this case.
If he was performing digital crimes to pay for human trafficking then I'd get it, but that's far from the case.
He did something illegal, repeatedly, he got caught, he got offered a lenient plea deal of a few months. Those are the facts.
Yet somehow y'all turn it into: he was harassed, his family's life was threatened, he was going to get life in prison.
I think it is the criminal record. Other places in the world, once you've served your time you can often go right back to living. Not that it is easy but it doesn't hang over you.
In the US, once you have a criminal record - any criminal record - there are flow on effects that keep fucking with you for life.
SWATing is "digital" but leads to very real death
The expectation is that such individual and laptop doing "unauthorized" scraping doesn't trigger a criminal investigation when the host university, and the target business, didn't implement any meaningful access controls or even rate limiting for any other person on campus.
The expectation is that after an investigation of scraping at 11 req/s (450,000 over 11 hours according to the report), a further 8,000 requests (before JSTOR blocked MIT's /8) two weeks later would not have the effect that "Half the servers in one data center failed, and JSTOR engineers feared that the entire service might go down worldwide." The expectation based on that claim by JSTOR is that JSTOR was incompetent or lying.
The expectation is that when MIT was able and willing to implement access control for JSTOR, and JSTOR declined because they want to develop a notice to MIT visitors who might be negatively affected by ending uncredentialed access, JSTOR would not then create a tempest in a teapot over the violator returning and continuing to download papers at a reduced speed that wasn't even detected for about a month. On Dec 26, when JSTOR again noticed the "abuse", they went to significant effort to route the violator's requests to a special server and serve them garbage instead of the real PDFs, all on short notice... yet they couldn't add the general notice to MIT visitors about the credentials requirement, on a much less urgent timescale; they had told MIT in October that they needed until after Dec 18th to add such a message. The expectation is that JSTOR's claims are self-serving lies.
The expectation is that such a request pattern would not trigger a report, by the MIT libraries director, to the MIT academic council, that a "cyberattack" had been launched from MIT's network.
The expectation is that you don't get arrested for felony B&E for entering a data closet that's effectively unlocked, connecting to a switch, and scraping a paper hosting site that offers free downloads from the entire institutional network.
The expectation is that you don't get charged with larceny for downloading, in any quantity, papers that are freely available to anyone on the MIT campus or probably most other campuses in the U.S.
The expectation is that sending web requests with a url parameter indicating T&C has been agreed to, and without saving cookies, might be a basis for a civil action, but is not "accessing a computer without authorization" under the CFAA.
The entire situation, at most, should've been a minor local crime and a lawsuit by JSTOR against Swartz. Yet the state charges were dropped (feds didn't want to share required discovery material), and JSTOR settled with Swartz before the feds even indicted.
MIT was caught in an awkward position of having the ability to block unauthenticated scraping to protect their contract with and access to JSTOR, but not doing so. So they proceeded to treat someone connecting to a switch in a data closet and doing what any MIT visitor could do, as a criminal offense.
I don't believe anyone at MIT was genuinely concerned that there was some broader criminal conspiracy when the issue was downloading of papers from JSTOR. Certainly not based on some random Chinese IP pinging or scanning Swartz's laptop. When the data closet laptop was discovered in January, MIT could have left a note telling the owner that JSTOR is very upset and it would be better for everyone if the scraping stopped. Why didn't they? They could even, reasonably, have taken the laptop and external drive and noted that the data closet was insecure and please contact network staff to claim it.
A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
Sure, but that still only covers a miniscule fraction of US taxpayers. Plus, you have to walk in to the school, library, or other institution, instead of just being able to use your web browser at home.
> A large number of the material on JSTOR wouldn't be online at all if not for JSTOR, because they have put a lot of time and money into digitizing back issues of journals that the publishers probably would have never gotten around to.
This is a genuine value add, but it could have been paid for by the government directly without then having the material behind a paywall.
The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.
Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding. That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
I think a better analogy for this situation is: The public donates food, then the recipient, after being fed, sells access to (infinite cheaply replicable copies of) said food for a profit. The public in this case just wants to have said food.
So when your tax dollars pay for a scientist to do research, you don't think the papers that document that research should be public property? If scientists want to keep their research private, they should find private funding.
Note that, as in my previous post, I said "should". If you mean there isn't explicit language to that effect in the grants, see further comments below.
> The public might donate food to the poor. That doesn't give them the right to go into their house and rummage through their fridge.
Invalid comparison. The scientific papers in question are not the personal property of the scientists.
> Maybe there is a missed opportunity to require open access as a condition of public grant funding.
IMO this should be the case, and it's an outrage that it's not, since it should be an obvious requirement for any research that our tax dollars pay for.
> That doesn't change the fact that it is not a stipulated condition.
Maybe that wasn't written into the grants explicitly, but that just means our government is (once again) failing to act in our best interests.
The public gives them cash for terms of a grant. If those dont include an open access paper, it is unreasonable to demand it after the fact. It certainly doesn't give a right to go take take their papers (or whatever they made).
It is fine to want for something to be different, but that doesn't change the facts of how they are.
It's fine to advocate future papers be made public. I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted. The word for this is expostfacto recontracting, and undermines just about any system of law where is used.
Last, there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public. Free public access is often the least of those concerns. Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.
To understand this better, consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding. The government might rightly calculate that it is in the public interest too help a for-profit company develop a cancer cure with grants, then have no cure at all.
No, you did that, by responding to my post where I said "should" as though I were trying to describe how things are instead of how they ought to be.
> I think it is antisocial and delusional to say past papers belong to the public just because that's what you would have wanted.
I didn't say that. You need to work on your reading comprehension.
> The word for this is expostfacto recontracting
No, the word for what you're doing is putting words in my mouth and attacking a straw man.
> there are lots of reasons to pay for research even if it is not made public.
Can you give some?
> Especially so when 99% of researchers whom might make meaningful use of the publication already have access through a journal system.
Which they then have to pay fees to, using more of our tax dollars, because of the sweetheart deals the government has given the journals.
Not only that, but researchers nowadays share copies of papers over the Internet routinely (for example, using sites like arxiv.org), so they don't even need journals to know what other researchers are doing. So even that rationale for paying the journals is now out of date.
> consider private drug patents coming from Public Funding
A patent requires revealing the information that the invention is based on, in exchange for the exclusive right to produce the item for some period of time. So I don't see how this is an argument for keeping publicly funded research behind a paywall.
I dont really want to get into a tit for tat, but for clarification, you said several times that the public had paid for the papers. Researchers were not paid to create open access papers. You even said it was criminal that they weren't.
> didn't say that. You need to work on your reading comprehension.
rude...
> Can you give some?
I gave a few. The government may want the technology in production and dont care at all about any public disclosure. all the researchers they care about will have journal access either way.
One I didn't mention is that researchers want the freedom to publish as they choose. The government is happy to trade this away as part of the grant process.
The point I was trying to illustrate is that there is no reason to think open access is a non-negotiable or top priority from the government (or public good) perspective. All things being equal, it is nice to have.
> I wasn't _actually_ going to hit you, quit being a baby.
Which is why its actually illegal to do that to people in a lot of places.
My issue is that the sentence is artificial and used for intimidation as opposed to being a rational basis for a justice system. Hence the mafia analogy.
Imagine if the US had a maximum sentence of 35 years for mere possession of a firearm but in practice, it would only be used in very unlikely conditions. It wouldn't last a minute. It's only allowed to be like this because nobody cares about tech.
This is effectively how all federal sentencing and reporting about that sentencing works, all the time. A lawyer blogger Popehat has talked about this for years[1]. Headlines pull add up all charges and the maximum statutory sentences for those and report it as if that's even remotely close to a likely outcome and it's not. In fact, Popehat actually wrote about that as it applied to Swartz in the aftermath of his suicide[2].
If you read about the Swartz prosecution, you saw people decrying the fact
that he was facing 35 years in prison. That's more than rapists and murders
serve, they say. But they are talking about the maximum possible sentences,
not any sentence he was remotely likely to get. Recently in the context of
another case I explained how federal sentencing works, and how it's driven by
an arcane set of rules producing a recommendation that federal judges often
follow — rules that on most occasions produce a result well below the
maximum possible sentence.
[1]: https://www.popehat.com/p/beware-the-flood-of-trump-sentenci...
[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150604204913/http://www.popeha...
Read the book Three Felonies A Day. The law is so bloated now that we all do illegal things all the time, we can't help it.
What Swartz actually did was to download copies of scientific papers that should be in the public domain to begin with, because we paid for the research already with our tax money. The fact that such information is considered "proprietary" and JSTOR and other companies are able to keep it locked behind paywalls is an outrage.
Further, after Swartz returned all the material he had downloaded and agreed not to do it again, both JSTOR and MIT said they were satisfied and no further action was needed (though JSTOR was more emphatic about it than MIT was). Which, combined with the above, should have ended the case then and there.
That's the root, but I think what Swartz actually did was anger someone at MIT, who called the Secret Service. The federal involvement persisted even after JSTOR and the state quit, and they had him served on a plate with MIT's help.
You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned phone call, as it turns out.
MIT was concerned that someone (they didn't know who it was at the time--in fact IIRC they didn't find out until the police told them after they caught Swartz) was using their network in a suspicious way. I don't know that anyone was "angered".
> You can set a surprising amount of government force in action with a concerned phone call, as it turns out.
I don't think the people at MIT who called in the police (and they were, IIRC, fairly low level people) had any idea what a shitstorm they were going to unleash. Nor do I think the (higher-level, but still IIRC not at the level of the top MIT administration) people at MIT who ended up interacting with the Federal prosecutor thought through what was actually going on as they should have, or had the issue considered by the MIT administration as a whole as it should have been.
The issue is that conservatives have always tried to force people to go along with their views, and reacted with oppression and violence towards anyone who didn't fit into their straightjacket.
> progressives haven't wanted the same rights for everyone for decades
It's been a developing journey. It started with rights for people who weren't noble born, then men who weren't rich, then women and ethnic minorities, then gay people, then transgender people. It's a gradual expansion of rights until everybody is able to enjoy the same rights.
I had assumed that readers would be able to exercise intelligence and common sense to see that I was describing how things should be, not how they are. Evidently I assumed too much in your case.
> rude...
It is to laugh: you had no problem describing me as "antisocial" and "delusional", and now you're complaining that I am being rude?
I think I'm done here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
"When it was discovered, a video camera was placed in the room to record Swartz; his computer was left untouched. The recording was stopped once Swartz was identified,"
IME, months-long internal investigations in an org with Secret Service involvement would be unlikely to escape senior management, but I'm just speculating and only have the same info as everyone else. You might be right.
They knew what was going on before they found the laptop. They had been briefed by someone at MIT who was in contact with JSTOR. I suspect that everyone on the networking staff (and possibly most of the university) knew of the JSTOR downloading situation after the second incident in October. JSTOR had blocked MIT for 3 days, and that must have caught people's attention.
Once they found the laptop, they involved police despite knowing to a virtual certainty that the problem with the laptop was that it was scraping JSTOR, again. They didn't know yet that it was Aaron, but they would've known it would turn out to be someone ideologically just like him.
There was nothing suspicious about it. It was simply jeopardizing MIT's contract with JSTOR. The use of a data closet like that was very bad manners.
In order to do this you need to have laws that are designed to be reasonable for people to actually follow instead of laws that are designed to allow prosecutors to find a violation whenever they want to.
Actually enforcing them would create pressure to do that, but it would also create pressure to go back to selective enforcement when powerful people object to being subjected to the unreasonableness of existing laws.
A better solution might be to make a showing of selective enforcement a means to strike down a law. If you can show that someone else was doing the same thing without being charged then the prosecution either has to charge them too or that law is struck down and no one can be charged with it anymore.
Then instead of the incentive not to charge powerful people creating pressure for selective enforcement, the same incentive creates pressure to strike down the laws that can't reasonably be uniformly enforced.
This is very interesting. I suspect there are a lot of unintended consequences that might follow.
IANAL, but my understanding is this: Malicious prosecution is a defense. Selective enforcement is not. The difference is for judges and juries to decide.
It's unlikely people would have enough evidence of high enough quality to make that case. The prosecution will just say the evidence isn't enough.
You'll also get some nice incentives where the government will be arguing that a particular behavior is not a violation of the law so they don't have to charge someone they don't want to, which in turn leaves you with that precedent if the judge agrees with them and then they want to charge someone else for doing that later.
I’ve often thought this about laws involving speed limits. When 95% of the people driving in a major downtown area are technically breaking the law, what is the purpose of the law but to target whoever you like then? Either enforce it unilaterally or come up with new laws.
And lest people think this is a one way street, each side thinks the other deserves interpreting the law to “get the real baddies.”
As applied needs to be changed so that it can be included in setting precedent and when considering the norms given out for punishment because right now it's highly abused to prevent establishing legal norms from judicial findings the way our system is supposed to.
Can’t remember where I read that but it has stuck with me.
The credo of the corrupt, courtesy of General Benavides
Reality should always have a place in the law.
Creating new arbitrage opportunities benefits the powerful, not the weak.
A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't go to jail, doesn't need a visa to work in a foreign country.
Imagine if the legal system took jail off the table and people could move to any country without a visa; only fines... We'd be overrun by criminals. They'd be able to monetize these two facts easily; they'd make more than enough money from criminal activity to cover all the fines.
The 1860s?
Or do you meant he royal charter companies from centuries prior?
This goes back so far that you can't even understand it.
>A corporation has more legal rights than a person if you think about it; no wonder they took over. A corporation can't
Corporations only exist because your government (especially if you live in Delaware) blesses them into existence. The moment that courts and government offices stopped recognizing their existence, they'd wither away like a bad dream on a sunny morning. You get that right? And yet you've never once questioned what allows them to exist. You've never challenged the government's power to create them in this manner. It'd be one thing if you decided that they should exist, and you explicitly granted your government the power to create them...
But everyone here behaves as if they were some inevitable law of physics and there's nothing to be done. Or maybe, secretly, you love corporations, and just hope that your political faction will somehow manage to wrest control and use them to your own ends. Sometimes that's what it feels like.
All valid, but as always, there's nuances in how people think about assimilation and other things: Normative-ness shouldn't be mistaken for intentional racism. As for normative-ness being systemic racism, there's good deal of changes to be sought there as well, but social institutions that rely on social norms often resist dramatic changes without dramatic escalation in social struggle. The thing with escalation is, it brings about social unrest, which most would prefer to not deal with at all, especially those (who believe in) climbing up the social ladder, or are (relatively) less harmed by the status quo.
There has to be a point where norms have to give way to freedom, but where do you draw that line?
I think the US court system is famous for being slow. Not sure if anyone wants to make it go even slower.
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
> Isn't that the other way around? The law already can't be enforced against the TBTF corporation, so what do they care if it stays on the books? But now you can't enforce it against someone else or they can point to you not enforcing it against them.
> Except that's the point. The government would now have to do that or they lose the law. If it's a good law then they don't want to lose it, but if it's a good law then they should be enforcing it against them.
> And, of course, the correct way to deal with this is to break the TBTF corporations into many smaller pieces so that stops being a problem.
The dead comment below by AnthonyMouse already pointed out that even in your scenario there's no difference with the status quo anyway. It's insane that it's dead and reeks of astroturfing, as nothing about it is worth flagging.
If you see such a comment, you can vouch for it (small menu point next to flag) and revive it. I did that now because I agree with your assessment - of late I do this very often because even comments which quote articles/laws etc. verbatim and with a link are flagged/voted to death.
This certainly seems better than just making TBTF (which I assume means too big to fail) entities be above the law.
Except that's the point. The government would now have to do that or they lose the law. If it's a good law then they don't want to lose it, but if it's a good law then they should be enforcing it against them.
And, of course, the correct way to deal with this is to break the TBTF corporations into many smaller pieces so that stops being a problem.
Edit: should have said 'poor tax'
The law is sufficiently complex and broad that there is essentially zero chance that you are not breaking a single one each day. The rich have gotten so powerful that can literally evade the consequences forever in most cases. For the rest of us, all we can hope is to avoid the scrutiny of the law.
It sounds like you're implying that it is impossible to create a system that makes penalties scale instead of just being a fee because the system will always be gamed.
Do you believe that or did I misunderstand you?
Whereas the proposal is typically to make the penalties scale with entity size, which a) is actually easier to game than the scope of the harmful activity, and b) does a bunch of things that make no sense, like increasing the amount of the fine for an oil spill if the company also generates additional revenue from producing solar panels.
The reason we run into trouble here usually isn't that the penalties are wrong, it's that the enforcement is weak. If you can steal $10 billion with only a 10% chance of enforcement that requires you to give back $30 billion then your expected value is an $8 billion gain. But that has nothing to do with the scale of the business. The exact same thing happens to with a company that steals $10,000 with only a 10% chance of enforcement.
And using disproportionate penalties doesn't really fix it either, because then they just roll the dice and file for bankruptcy if they encounter enforcement. You can't fine them more money than they actually have. When the rate of enforcement is too low, that isn't enough to make them comply, because a small chance of -100% is profitable against a large chance of +50%. Whereas if enforcement is consistent then disproportionate penalties aren't even necessary.
Being able to game a naive implementation of such scaling is not an argument for not scaling penalties but for designing the concrete implementation to be hard to game and/or applying even higher penalties when someone has been found to try to game the system - which is something that should be done more in general.
We can absolutely make it so that people hiring private chauffeurs share in the liability for breaking traffic laws just like we can absolutely hold CEOs liable for illegal activities done by employees under their purview.
Presumably your "feast or famine" business owner did the responsible thing with leveling their income, no? They didn't? Oh, why would that be the public's concern. That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).
The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.
It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
"Have someone who pays the lower amount do the thing" is precisely arbitrage.
> That would level out in their feasting years, after all (assuming you're using the previous year's taxable income, or an average income over the previous three years or so).
Their income for the last three years was $10k, $10k and $1M. Their 20 year average is $80k but the three year average is $340k. So now you're increasing their exposure even more -- before they get a hugely disproportionate fine if it happens to be in the one year they made $1M. Now they still get a disproportionate fine but are exposed to it for three times as long.
> The chauffeur is subject to the rules around their CDL or similar, or is in service of their employer. When driving a work vehicle, my fines are already directed at my employer.
Michael Dell hails a cab and then the driver gets a speeding ticket. No evidence driver had any idea of his passenger's net worth; no evidence the passenger ever requested exceeding the speed limit and couldn't see the speedometer from the back seat. Is this a billion dollar fine? Who pays it, the person who has nothing like a billion dollars or the person who did nothing wrong?
It's clearly unreasonable to impose the fine in that case, but it's also easy to use it for arbitrage if you don't.
> It blows my mind how much we are willing to bend over backwards to ensure the powerful won't suffer a moment's inconvenience in this country.
Maybe we should have a preference for rules that are effective rather than performative.
Not quite how he phrased it, but close. Original is here: https://wist.info/steinbeck-john/46582/
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" quote is from Ronald Wright. The Steinbeck quote is actually very different than the Ronald Wright quote.
The actual quote is mocking wealthy armchair leftists rather than explaining why the American working class rejected socialism:
>>Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: “After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?” Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picnickers on her property. ...
And the post you're responding to is making a much less extreme position, that it's hard to scale the fine properly.
For instance, someone might be significantly speeding for 10 years, and never hurting anyone or causing any harm (financial or otherwise). Should they pay nothing?
Or should we distribute harm from all speeders (accidents, injuries and deaths) to everyone speeding?
But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
The US was always about dreamers taking big risks for big rewards. There are a lot of things that can be fixed that don't remove that ceiling that other countries have.
Yes, that one. Increasing everyone's risk is harm, sorry if I wasn't clear about that part.
> But does a fixed fee speeding ticket disincentivise behaviour that is known to cause harm statistically?
The line of thought here is: Does it matter? If the average speeder pays $2 of fines per $1 of harm, it's a net positive. Yes that does let rich people buy priority. But rich people can usually buy priority. At least they're not getting a helicopter involved.
Probably not, but we can look at the averages anyway.
> how much does 200 lives lost cost? is it their accumulated net worth? expected earnings through what would have been left of their careers? how about lost limbs, emotional damage etc?
200 statistical lives are worth about 2 billion dollars. That question has an easy to look up expert answer, and you don't worry about the details of each case.
> how can you even be sure how much has speeding and not something else mainly contributed to the harm
We have some useful numbers on the impact of speeding, and for something like this assume the worst plausible impact.
Edit: If there's around 1 death per hundred million vehicle miles and it's worth ten million dollars, that's ten cents of death per mile. If a quarter of deaths have speeding as a factor and we exaggerate that to 100% blame, that's 2.5 cents per mile divided by how rare speeding is. If we guess 15% of people are speeding at any moment, that's 17 cents of damage per mile. To pay double they'd need a $200 ticket every 600 miles of speeding.
You'd also need to amortize the damages over years, and then spread it to all the speeding tickets issued.
So I'd actually simplify it: if we say $40000 billion (11k deaths annually times $2b plus non-deaths too and financial damages to cars and infrastructure) of damages amortized over 10 years and spread to 40M tickets annually in USA, that's actually around $100k average per speeding ticket.
I'd also note that we can't assume worst possible impact as there will be combined offenses too — eg. simultaneous drunk driving and speeding — and this means that some damages need to be covered by drunk driving ticket instead :)
Edit: update numbers to reflect annual deaths attributed to speeding in US.