Pneumonia doesn't have any societal benefit. The process by which we decide if the law was broken and punishment necessary has obvious benefit. If you mean we should seek a cure for dangerous suicidal depression, I agree. But you surely are not suggesting that, for example, has Swartz been accused of embezzlement that the state drop out finish the charges purely because he's a suicide risk; how would that be just to the people who were stolen from?

And it's a point of semantics, but no; we generally don't say people who died by suicide died by the things going on in their life when they ended it. Everybody has stressors. The suicidal also have mental illness. Mr. Swartz had self-documented his past suicidal ideation.

We evolved with pneumonia for some reason. It could easily be a Chesterton Fence. We don't treat this as one because we don't want people to die of it.

I agree that a system of laws has benefit to society. However the system we've worked out for making such laws is clearly being warped and twisted to serve one small section of society at the expense of everyone else.

A clear case being the comment that started this conversation - Swartz was hounded to death for doing the exact same thing that AI companies are doing and they're facing zero punishment. AI executives are not being dragged from their offices by burly policemen and thrown into cells, yet they have done the exact same thing that Swartz did to merit that behaviour. It's not unreasonable to question the societal benefit of this system.

And we totally should say that people died of depression, or financial stress, or legal persecution, or whatever. Most people have suicidal ideation at some point in their lives, that's not unusual. Being hassled to the point where you go through with it is definitely violence. Classing this as "mental illness" and therefore a personality defect is a form of victim blaming.

> We evolved with pneumonia for some reason. It could easily be a Chesterton Fence.

It's not, and I don't think you're seriously arguing this point so I'm going to ignore it.

It is, I think, a reasonable observation that had Swartz formed an LLC to pursue advanced analysis of academic papers for, I don't know, trends in the language used in research and slurped bunch of JSTOR for that purpose, the trial would have taken longer and involved more lawyers. That's probably an observation that should give us pause. Or not, because nobody argued that's what he did or that was his intent, including him. So I also think the premise of comparison to the current circumstances is flawed; I don't think the CFAA can be applied in a context where people have access rights and go through Google's front door to scan videos for the purpose of training a machine learning algorithm. It might be a TOS violation. It's not hiding a server in a closet with unauthorized physical access, which is what Swartz was accused of.

Intent matters, and, sadly, we never got to the trial where intent could have been proven out.

> Being hassled to the point where you go through with it is definitely violence.

The government does have the monopoly on violence. But I think what happened to Swartz is a far cry from that, as he never got to sentencing, much less trial. There was some light compulsion (requirement to appear in court), of course. But everyone who's ever wanted to contest a parking ticket has to experience that. Sadly, this train of thought goes into a station of "Swartz should have been under professional care if his condition was this much a danger to him," and I don't know how the government should change its behavior if he wasn't. Prosecutors are not prognosticators of the mental health of defendants, and I've never read anywhere that Swartz wanted to be committed for mental illness.

Our system is much harder for defendants grappling with mental illness; I'll acknowledge and argue for change regarding that. I don't know that such change would conclude with "Swartz should never have been accused of committing a crime that a lot of evidence suggests he committed," however.

All good points, thanks for the constructive reply.

Your point that Swartz would have had a different result had he formed an LLC, and hired a bunch of lawyers, is definitely the key point here. A legal system that only works for the rich and powerful is not something we should defend, support, or put up with.

His purpose in copying research papers and making them available for free is massively more in the public interest than anything the AI companies are doing. They are, after all, seeking to make a profit at the end of this. And they knowingly and deliberately broke copyright law because it was "too hard" to make any kind of licensing deal with the publishers. You can argue about fair use and transformative purposes (as their lawyers have done), but you can also argue from Swartz's point of view that this information was (to a large extent) publicly funded and therefore belonged to the public, and trying to get the journals to acknowledge that is "too hard". And had he been able to afford lawyers, that's a possible line they could have taken. But he didn't get the chance. As you say, we never got to the trial so we will never know.

It's definitely not a stretch to say that his crime and the AI companies' crimes (which they admit to - they admit to downloading source texts from pirate sites) are comparable, even equivalent. Yet their treatment is not.

My understanding of his treatment is that it was a lot more than "light compulsion" and that he underwent a sustained campaign of enforcement activity and litigation at the hands of a specific prosecutor. But given that the AI companies have had nothing - no criminal charges - just a civil case brought by the authors they admit to ripping off, then I don't think I need to push this point. They are clearly being treated differently to him, despite the similar actions.

We haven't gotten to the part of the trial for Anthropic yet where we determine whether they actually broke the law when they downloaded from pirate sites. Copyright has multiple exceptions. And on the topic at hand here (training on YouTube videos to understand space and relationships in it), I don't think even Google would want to make the case that it's a violation of copyright.

That's the thing about copyright; it's a whole category of law more based in utility than morality. One of the reasons AI is such a fight right now is that nobody was opposing it as an academic project when it was generating, for example, tools that could go from an image to describing the image, or from an image to recognizing the likely artistic style and helping somebody find the original artist. But with just a few tweaks those tools became devices for generating novel images, and now people are upset. Intent matters.

And again, you are drawing equivalence between harvesting data from openly accessible sources online and hiding a server in a closet with unauthorized physical access to a network. Swartz's prosecution wasn't accusing him of copyright violation; it was accusing him of compromising a network. A far more serious charge; if the researchers in the story here had collected those YouTube videos by wiretapping the fiber optics between two of Google's data centers I suspect they would have concerns.