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Comment by alphan0n | Hacker News Reader

No one (in the US) has been jailed for downloading copyrighted material.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

And the US is not the only jurisdiction

That's not the same as piracy though. He wasn't downloading millions of scientific papers from libgen or sci-hub, he was downloading them directly from jstor. Indeed, none of his charge was for copyright infringement. It was for stuff like "breaking and entering" and "unauthorized access to a computer network".

The exact same charges could apply to the AI scrapers illegitimately accessing random websites.

Part of the accusation comes from the fact that Swartz accessed the downloads through a MIT network closet, which AI companies wasn't doing. The equivalent to that would be if openai broke into a wiring closet at Disneyland to download Disney movies.

The CFAA is vague enough to punish unauthorized access to a computer system. I don't have an example case in mind, but people have gotten in trouble for scraping websites before while ignoring e.g. robots.txt

The CFAA might be vague, but the case law on scraping pretty much has been resolved to "it's pretty much legal except in very limited circumstances". It's regrettable that less resourced defendants were harassed before large corporations were able to secure such rulings, but the rulings that allowed scraping occurred before AI companies' scraping was done, so it's unclear why AI companies in particular should be getting flak here.

I haven’t seen any accusations that they’ve done that, though. Usually people get pirated material from sources that intentionally share pirated material.

They're not just training on pirated content, they've also scraped literally the entire internet and used that too.

Scraping the public internet is also not a CFAA violation

CFAA bans accessing a protected computer without authorization. Hitting URLs denied by robots.txt has been argued to be just that.

> Hitting URLs denied by robots.txt has been argued to be just that.

"Has been argued" -- sure, but never successfully; in fact, in HiQ v. LinkedIn, the 9th Circuit ruled (twice, both before and on remand again after and applying the Supreme Court ruling in Van Buren v. US) against a cease and desist on top of robots.txt to stop accessing data on a public website constituting "without authorization" under the CFAA.

Now do every other jurisdiction

CFAA was mentioned specifically, which means only US jurisdiction is relevant here.

No, they couldn't, since the then-novel and untested strained interpretation of the CFAA that the prosecutor was relying on has since been tested in the courts and soundly rejected.

Aaron Swartz was not jailed or even charged for copyright infringement. The discussion and the comment I replied to is centered around US companies and jurisdiction.

The thread is centered around US companies, but not US jurisdiction.

There could be a moral question. For example a researcher might not want to download a pirated paper and cause loss to a fellow researcher. But it becomes pretty stupid to pay when everyone, including large reputable companies endorsed by the government, is just downloading the content for free. Maybe his research will help developing faster chips to win against China, why should he pay?

Would it be a "fair use" to download pirated papers for research instead of buying?

Also I was gradually migrating from obtaining software from questionable sources to open source software, thinking that this is going out of trend and nobody torrents apps anymore, but it seems I was wrong?

Or another example: if someone wants to make contributions to Wine but needs a Windows for developing the patch, what would be the right choice, buy it or download a free copy from questionable source?

Researchers don't get paid when their papers are downloaded, though. They pay to have their papers downloaded, and the middleman makes money on both sides. Piracy is the only moral option for them. There is a reason every single competent professor in the western world will email you a free copy of their papers if you ask nicely.

What about people filming movies in the cinema (for learning of course)? [1]

[1] https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/unauthorized-rec...

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