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Comment by yupyup54133 | Hacker News Reader

When someone does this to Facebook its malicious and they go to jail. WHen Facebook does it to someone else... "oops".

Never forget Aaron Swartz. All he did was send download requests to JSTOR. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ

I'm going to get a ton of hate for this, but he was doing it with the intent to redistribute the content for free. He didn't own the content. There's a big difference. That being said it's very sad what came about of that. I really don't think the FBI needed to be involved.

> he was doing it with the intent to redistribute the content for free

There is actually no proof of this.

Really? I felt that what happened to Aaron was a tragic injustice on many levels (from the fact that he was charged at all to the number of charges they threw at him), but for some reason I had always thought that it was fairly well-known that that was his intent.

I have no idea where I got that impression from, but I do recall reading several articles about him, as well as his blog around that time. It's possible I just internalized others' assumptions about his behavior, but it certainly seemed like an in-character thing for him to to.

IIRC, he had published a manifesto about how he believed that information that was paid for with public funds should be free for the public to view. However, I don't believe that he ever mentioned why he was making get requests to JSTOR's servers and I know that he never uploaded any of those JSTOR documents to the internet for public download.

Yeah, but any decent criminal lawyer could tear "he once wrote a manifesto" to shreds. His political beliefs would only be pertinent if he wrote the manifesto somehow in connection with what he was doing; otherwise, it would not be sufficient to show intent to distribute.

Criminal law is about proving things, not in-charachter assumptions.

Intent is the sticking point for the vast majority of prosecutions. That's why you have a jury, not Compute-o-Bot 9000.

Yeah and Facebook did this crawlings with intent to commit CFAA - computer fraud and abuse, now someone call the feds quickly before the perpetrators are zucked into hiding

From the point of view of the law, the intent (malicious or benevolent) is often as important as the action itself.

Nah, it only matters if you are a large corporation or not. If you are a large corporation you will ruin your opponent financial with legal fees (whether they are guilty or not). If you are a small timer going up against a large corporation they will delay the court case until you can not afford the legal fees.

The always-classic "what color are your bits?"

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

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