So scraping means any harvesting of data now?
We need a new name for the fairly painful process of trying to tease meaning out of people’s unstructured HTML.
In any case downloading a bunch of stuff from JSTOR was not scraping. And he absolutely had authorised access to that data. They took exception to the quantity, mainly.
Scraping has multiple connotations.
Web scraping is a specific type of scraping, but data via APIs or even torrents could be considered a scrape, even if that data is nicely structured.
The commonality between them is they all have the implication that:
- the data harvesting is automated
- the data you harvest is not owned by you, and you don’t have explicit permission to use it
- the scope of what you harvest is broad and not targeted at retrieving specific limited pieces of data
Any access patterns that broadly correspond to this could be considered scraping.
Also that he was planning, or already was, sharing the data for free. They made an example out of him because he believed such data should be for everybody.
Did he pay a fee to the king and visit his inauguration like Zucker?
He (who founded and stood behind the original concept of Reddit) was so forcefully charged that he decided to commit suicide because he believed that information deserves to be free.
The anti-piracy efforts of the RIAA and MPAA (and the publishing houses and…) are still pretty robust, but that didn’t stop any of the big AI companies from using gigatons of copyrighted material as datasets to train their LLMs. It’s why when you ask them to generate an image featuring Winnie The Pooh, they all know what you’re talking about.
But the big companies absolutely did not get permission to do this. Nor did anyone give permission to allow for the recent jailbreaks by AI task systems to hack into other companies. If that were any singular human (not of the owner class) they’d face charges under the CFAA. But since it’s a massive company with an army of blue-haired lawyers, nothing was done about it, and the companies actually bragged about their AIs escaping containment.
Extinction by AI takeover is far more interesting than extinction by global drought.
About a year ago I saw coverage on IA getting reamed for the cases they were dealing with, there were many takes during then and it turned out the way it did (and continues to) but my take on it basically extends from what the govt did to Swartz, in that IA had to deal with all of that almost entirely on their own and take on the mental turmoil, meanwhile Meta et al not only got away and continues to get away with it but in fact are now partnering up with other mega corps doing the same shit, for profit. It dead set almost feels like they’re mocking us by going this far with these ventures, they’re like “Yeah the govt moralized and killed someone for the same shit we’re getting govt contracts for and ADVERTISING ON OUR OWN PLATFORMS, gonna do something about it? Mad?”.
All of this amounts to the most open and shut case of “if you have enough money, you can get away with anything, objectively anything”
Obligatory FUCK SPEZ
RIP Aaron.
Fuck Congress and the DoJ as well. How the fuck can Reddit still have Section 230 protections after what spez did?
Because Swartz didn’t have a legion of expensive lawyers at his disposal. ☹️
Because Swartz was merely a natural person, while Meta is an almighty corporation. Everybody knows only corporations deserve rights, duh!
the profits have spoken
Goddamn, that’s good
Because Swartz wanted a free and open web and the powers that be wanted control over every major social media website. This was around the same that moot showed up in Epstein’s emails and would later sell his site. All in the run up to the 2016 election. Now think about how /r/thedonald stayed on the site for so long.
And was murdered by the US government.
Lol, doesn’t matter if you have expensive lawyers. What matters is that you have counsel that goes to church with the judge or plays golf at the country club with them, or knows people that do. Or you’re a Zionists genocide supporter and pedophile like Alan Dershowitz.
expensive lawyers
Fuck what they did to that guy. We should have revolted then.
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Democracy was always a mirage, it was only for rich white guys in the beginning, not the enslaved Africans and genocided natives. We’ve found ways around giving liberty to at least some portion of people continuously since.
More like we’ve known, but it’s been more tolerable until recently. We got frog boiled, and are just realizing we’re cooked.
Obviously fuck Meta, but the difference is the publishing. Scraping and copying for personal or business use is a civil matter. And machine learning from unlicensed material is also fine - as long as the material isn’t “memorized” and an AI model can’t reproduce it.
Aaron bravely published the papers which is a criminal matter. That is why I believe copyright and IP law is the real theft, they take down copies for people to learn from.
There are many many millions of people who read and learned from pirated textbooks and who use those skills to do things. Who watched pirated amines or comics use that to learn how to draw.
Basically we should not be siding with the unethical side of IP law just to oppose AI corporations. They can afford to buy the books and media, and a simple purchase will do. And they can afford the lawsuits. And they will figure out the memorization problem, so that AI models learn but not memorize (which is only happens in like 1% of the cases and only when you specifically ask for something “just like that”).
China (so far) is saying that the AI models they produce should be open weight and be available to all people on earth. So if we have any issues it should be with the monopolization of AI models that concentrate this new developing immense power of AI in the hands of a few plutocrats. Which the IP laws might actually help them with.
He didn’t publish them, as far as I know. The charges brought against him were centered around the allegedly “fraudulent” use of his JSTOR account and the fact that he downloaded the files from the premises of an institution he did not belong to by plugging his laptop in a network switch in a restricted area where he wasn’t allowed to be. The actual deed was minor, likely not even criminal as far as digital rights were concerned, and the charges were famously so out of proportion that even other attorneys and legal scholars questioned them publicly. The publishers wanted to make an example, and it drove Swartz into suicide before a proper trial could be held.
Meta and other companies do essentially the same thing at a much larger scale and with the clear intent to monetize it through publishing AI models built on top of it all. The main difference is the legal climate, which has changed since/due to Swartz, and the lack of clarity that the law has for these new applications. Substantively though, there is a good bit of hypocrisy here, and it makes sense to point this out.
Aaron bravely published the papers
I don’t think he did.
I thought that was where a bunch of the initial core of libgen/anna’s archive was from? Maybe I’m wrong
If only we could figure out the difference between these two things, we could learn so much! Alas, it is unknowable.
Aaron is definately on my wall of heroes. I think much of our leadership does not understand how despite there being billions of people on the planet they are not just fungible commodities. That we lose every time and stunt our growth. I by no means mean we should have more populationa as what we have is to much for the biosphere. Its about smartly using what we have than thinking you can just replace a person with another.
Aaron was not charged with scraping public servers, he was charged with unauthorized access. He “hacked” the server. Meta just scraped publicly accessible information.
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Let’s be clear about this: Aaron absolutely had authorized access.
I’m on Aaron’s side, but didn’t he break into a network closet and patch directly into their servers?
It’s splitting hairs but the law treats breaking and entering very differently than remote access. When I went to school, I had a job on campus but I’m sure the University would have considered it illegal if I broke into the utility closet of the building I worked in.
didn’t he break into a network closet and patch directly into their servers?
No. He placed a computer in a unlocked network closet and used that to download a bunch of data from JSTOR (which he had acces to, and a lot of the data is public domain anyways) and kinda-sorta caused DDoS attack against the service. Prosecution then slapped him with a shitload of federal charges which (in my opinion) were largely at least massively exaggerated if not straight made up. Threat of 50 year jail sentence and million(s) in fines then pushed him to take his own life.
Wikipedia has pretty detailed info about him and the whole case.
But he did have access via university. Besides, my understanding is he was scraping research journals, many of which would not have been possible without grants from tax dollars. Meaning the mere fact that the research is publicly funded means the journals should also be public.But they didn’t even prove he distributed them. For all we know, he was planning to have an AI use them for training and apparently that isn’t a problem.
You do realize as well that almost every site you visit makes API requests. And you can then use the same API to request other data directly. And the difference between “public” and unauthorized access often comes down to whether you used the same API that your browser would call, but instead decided to make other calls to it directly.
but instead decided to make other calls to it directly.
Like with command line tools? But that’d be hacking! Egads!
Is it a B&E if the door is wide open…or would that just be an ‘E’?
If you let your neighbor walk in to your house as he pleases…can you get mad at him if he walks in like Cosmo Kramer while you’re shagging your wife? Assuming you’re not into that, of course.
What if he had noble intents…like he heard the moans and thought you were at work and he was about to break up an affair or stop a rape or have some leftovers?
Bruh, can you lick metas boots any harder? There’s so many examples of them using unauthorized access even long before llm’s were a thing…but even if that wasn’t the case, they just fucking bragged about their “ai” hacking other companies. Stop spreading lies for the billionaires, it’s pathetic.
Take it easy. artyom might just be mistaken you don’t need to turn it into a class war.
At this point it already has been turned into a class war. They get away with so many crimes and just a slap on the wrist. If an individual does it life sentences. Almost like the laws are made to be broken by the rich.
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I am not “licking boots”, I am discussing facts. And I’m gonna keep doing it.
There’s so many examples of them using unauthorized access even long before llm’s were a thing
Sure, there’s an endless list of awful things they’ve done, but that’s not what’s being discussed here.
I’m not talking about random awful things they’ve done I’m talking specifically about unauthorized access issues which is literally what you named as being the difference. Get some reading comprehension.
I’m talking specifically about unauthorized access issues which is literally what you named as being the difference.
Correct, that is the difference between what I said and what the author said. The author is talking about scraping. Get some reading comprehension. You don’t even have to read the article, it’s literally in the title.
The article is trash, we’re talking about your comment, hence why I replied to you. You lied just like the article did.
And women used to be burned at the stake because society didn’t like them, now they just get paid lower wages. It’s called progress…
Edit: I guess we aren’t doing dark sarcasm in the classroom today, huh?
