Re:Aaron Swartz was not a saint
by orionblastar on Monday February 04, 2013 @11:17PM
(#5169021)
Nobody claimed he was a saint, not that I know of. What they said was that he was a hacktivist and broke the law in protest of it being unfair. He found a loophole by using a closet at MIT to download JSTOR data behind an MIT IP address and kept changing his MAC address when they banned his old MAC address.
Some of you run a script that automatically changes your MAC address every time you reboot your system, apparently that is a crime how.
Google runs a web robot that scrapes content, no different than what Aaron wrote to scrap JSTOR articles.
The only real difference is that Aaron did not ask JSTOR for permission to download content. How many of you use Bit Torrent to download files without permission?
It is not so much that Aaron was innocent and a saint, he was not, it is more the case of they tried to make an example out of him and bullied and harassed him and brought outrageous punishments to him that far exceed his crimes.
The man was bullied and harassed by lawyers until he killed himself. You got cases of teenagers doing that to other teenagers over the Internet and call the bullies as murderers. But if a lawyer does it to a defendant it is not considered a murder, is it? Well maybe it should be?
Some of you run a script that automatically changes your MAC address every time you reboot your system, apparently that is a crime how.
Google runs a web robot that scrapes content, no different than what Aaron wrote to scrap JSTOR articles.
The only real difference is that Aaron did not ask JSTOR for permission to download content. How many of you use Bit Torrent to download files without permission?
It is not so much that Aaron was innocent and a saint, he was not, it is more the case of they tried to make an example out of him and bullied and harassed him and brought outrageous punishments to him that far exceed his crimes.
The man was bullied and harassed by lawyers until he killed himself. You got cases of teenagers doing that to other teenagers over the Internet and call the bullies as murderers. But if a lawyer does it to a defendant it is not considered a murder, is it? Well maybe it should be?