cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/55039106
Use a vpn. A good one.
this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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This comparison is flawed. Training AI on freely available data isn’t the same as pirating copyrighted material. Piracy means unauthorized access for personal use or distribution, while AI training processes text as input without reproducing or selling it directly.
You can’t have a system where individuals expect free access to information but demand that corporations pay for the same data. If something is truly free, it should be free for everyone.
No one expects an artist inspired by Michelangelo or Raphael to pay their estates for using their techniques or styles. Once knowledge and creativity enter the public domain, they become part of collective human progress.
That said, I fully support what Aaron Swartz did—hell, I would’ve done it myself. But on the flip side, let’s not ignore that JSTOR was a subscription-based service, meaning he was literally stealing paywalled content. It’s not the same as AI training on publicly available data.
And let’s be real—the three platforms mentioned exist in a legal gray area. It’s hypocritical to say individuals can use them freely, but corporations can’t. These sites exist solely to make information accessible to everyone, and you can’t pick and choose who gets to benefit.
The Internet was never the same after his death...it was the start of the downfall of the Internet as we knew it, but society too
Going to get a stern letter from their ISP
The murderer's name is Carmen Ortiz. He died so she could "make her name" as a DA. Fucking piece of trash.
Yeah, that's the big issue with the prosecutorial system. District attorneys are incentivized to secure convictions, not to seek the truth.
In fact, especially in criminal law, the truth is often completely irrelevant. The system is designed more to "make an example" out of people rather than simply ensuring the law functions as it should. It's a flawed design and a pretty damning reflection of our society.
Just finishing the film and now I get why I don't have a good memory of this. Had a bad period 2010 on crested by 2012 which then was a really bad year as the start of my new normal was kicking in. Ironically I basically had started being on reddit later into 2013 when things started turning around for me.
A wise man once told me: "there's no such thing as problems, just expenses"
As someone who made several bold moves over the last 7 years to get on the right side of a very obvious societal slide to selfishness, I can confirm.
The assets I cobbled together have allowed me to do the little things like sanitize all my house's air and water on entry ahead of this digital cold war. China is literally dormant in a large percentage of US utilities' networks waiting for orders. I expect them to poison water supplies remotely by releasing normally-benign water treatment chemicals in unsafe doses.
To all those who said I was crazy for putting my sweat and tears into preparing: I never could have guessed it'd be this bad, this quickly either. Happy I followed my gut though!
What does any of this have to do with this post specifically??
Um... relating to the title and offering a unique 1st person perspective supporting the fact that one can buy their way out of most problems that aren't terminal diseases?
geez I did not realize his role in reddit. I can't imagine what he would think about what its become and I think he would love the fediverse.
Facebook stole from sites without the means to defend themselves. Schwartz stole from an organization with the means to financially ruin him and lock him up.
Sadly lady justice’s scales only tips for the side of money
Not sure if this is the right guy but iirc he also outright had permission to download material? Like it straight up wasn't a crime but they decided to prosecute him for it anyway.
This is the first post I've seen where my app (Boost) has shown the vote score as simply: 1k
Congrats guys. Lemmy is growing
When I see people remembering Aaron Swartz I SLAM THE UPVOTE BUTTON.
AS I SHOULD
A beautiful soul who was ripped from this world by the grief of trying to make it better.
Academic journals are huge grifts.
You pay to submit your article. The people who review your article are usually doing it for free/prestige - they aren’t usually paid by the journal. You don’t get paid when someone reads or downloads your article. The journals then make deals with institutions and libraries to sell these articles at monstrously ridiculous subscription fees, making the articles effectively inaccessible to the public. (JSTOR now lets you make a free account and access a couple little things, even that is a concession)
It’s not beneficial for anyone. They depend on the fact that you have to publish to have a career. Keep in mind tons of research is funded by public money too. These companies add almost no value and take in all of the profit.
Because of how shitty and scammy this system already was, more serious grifters have realized that they can run journals just to get paid. There’s an epidemic of these predatory journals publishing abysmal research.
Most of the people who write the articles hate this system too - many profs will often happily send you a pdf or chapter if you send a nice email.
Ok I simply don't understand how the same means and methods used by the free and open source software community have not been employed here. These are smart people! Just start your own damn free journal service, found a council and tap some industry-leading researchers in some common fields to start reviewing papers.
This is like driving through a decent neighborhood and being like "The mob rules this neighborhood? Why don't people just tell them to leave?".
Academic publishers are just very specialized gangs, there is no functional difference between the business model of Elsevier and the business model of a local crimelord.
This isn't hyperbole, it is a joke, but it is also just basically the truth of it.
Scientists are hamsters that are put onto specific hamster wheels that they must spin for a certain amount of time each day lest they be fired, one of those hamster wheels is doing free labor (peer reviewing) for academic journals like Elsevier. Like a good mafia system, academic publishers don't have to openly threaten to hurt scientists to compel them to do free labor as the system is set up to simply grind them to dust if they don't excitedly jump on the hamster wheel of providing free value to said academic publishers.
Imagine for a minute academic publishing was like the music industry except it paid musicians shit and all the profits, of which there were major profits, never went to the musicians but instead to a bunch of vacuous middlemen who condescendingly took the musicians money while telling them their labor is next to worthless. Lol (I am crying inside right now) now imagine that unlike the real music industry this hypothetical music industry was heavily subsidized by tax payers but still SOMEHOW those musicians still had all the profits of their labor transferred to the ownership of a small number of rich people even though taxpayers had paid for it and thus like the musicians deserved to own it themselves.
I am not in academia but did participate in published research both in college and in a job as a lab assistant afterward. I don't really think your analogy holds up. There is literally no cost to such a change; scientists just need to start READING and CITING papers from free, alternative journals for them to be legitimized. The profit incentives of the universities, private industry, and government that fund the majority of research are not affected by the choice of the medium of exchange of ideas. Only the journals' pockets.
You aren't wrong, there isn't actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.
The mafia is only ever just one jerk at the top who makes every chump underneath them scared enough not to look to their neighbor and go "do we really need this asshole?". Just understanding the current conditions as a pure product of individual agents agreeing to consent or not to is not a complete picture, you have to include in the context the ways in which a culture of consent both in what is necessary and what is possible is created that is essential to the suffocating power of the system to preclude other possibilities.
There's actually a bunch of journals that have Open Access (making the articles available for free, usually under Creative Commons licenses). That at least eliminates the cost for the readers.
However, that's not a guarantee the OA journals don't collect publication fees, or even that the fees would be smaller than on non-OA journals. Fees range from "just trying to keep the lights on" to "same ol' grift, but ostensibly nicer to the reader".
Also, starting a new journal is always a bit of a tricky process in that you obviously want the people to trust in the journal and starting from total zero makes it harder. There have been a bunch of journals that were outright scams and OA obviously won't fix that.
Also go ahead and guess what kinds of journals are considered prestigious in academia and will open critical doors for a scientist in their career....
hint, it isn't the ones trying to make academic publishing better and accessible for all
While I honestly agree with the theme, the difference is that Meta wasn't looking to share them with others, at least not in their original form.
I can download terabytes of content to train my AI (hypothetically) and I don't think anyone but my ISP (and not because of IP issues, more for being a disproportionate consumer of their resources) would notice me, including and whatever industry I was using content from. It's the sharing that incurs the real damages.
Admittedly, Generative AIs are basically going to "share" the content (with someone, likely for a fee) as well but not in its original form.
even if they do get punished it will just be a fine which is like a pocket change for them
Aaron Schwartz and Ian Murdock are the two people I have never met I truly mourn to this day. So much good that was just not compatible with this shitty world.
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