Have a look at this: https://m.slashdot.org/story/180969 Clearly there is precedent in the US and elsewhere for prosecution based on accessing URLs. Politicians have even argued that you should not be able to tamper with website source code in your browser, or otherwise use websites in any way not anticipated by the owners.
>Two things can be true at once: what Swartz did was in fact cool and laudable, it still shouldn't be legal. Similarly, a reasonable person might consider it cool and laudable to punch a nazi, doesn't mean it should be legal. We live in an age where people call other people Nazis as if uttering the accusation gives them a free pass to infringe on the rights of those people. Even if it could be proven to be true, the facts would not grant them any such right.
Theft and unprovoked assault are neither cool nor legal. I don't care if we're talking about absolute assholes, either. For each and every one of us, there is probably someone in the world who thinks that they should have our property and have the right to attack us.
>Swartz killed himself, so the CFAA must be bad, but it's probably realistic to assume that Swartz did not kill himself because he was scared of spending a few months in prison. He was likely seriously mentally ill, and a victim of the poor state of the US healthcare system, not of the CFAA or the DOJ.
Idk that much about this case. It seems to me that Swartz was in a hell of a lot of trouble, that could have gotten him a prison term along with financial and career ruination. He clearly should not have killed himself but that kind of stress can make people lose sight of the future.
> Have a look at this: https://m.slashdot.org/story/180969 Clearly there is precedent in the US and elsewhere for prosecution based on accessing URLs
"prosecution based on accessing URLs" is a dishonest way of describing this case. It's a prosecution based on accessing URLs with malicious intent, while the persons responsible knew they were not intended to access said URLs.
That's like saying "prosecution based on walking through a doorway". Well yeah, except it was the middle of the night and the door to someone else's house had been accidentally left unlocked.
>Idk that much about this case. It seems to me that Swartz was in a hell of a lot of trouble, that could have gotten him a prison term along with financial and career ruination. He clearly should not have killed himself but that kind of stress can make people lose sight of the future.
Swartz had good lawyers; he was certainly aware that he wasn't in big trouble. He was facing neither financial nor career ruination. The damages he had caused were far from enough to result in financial ruination. The charges had made him even more of a celebrity and would've been a boost to his career.
Orin Kerr, a top subject matter expert addressed this extensively. In the second part he also offers the best criticism of CFAA, which is that it's almost entirely redundant given the existence of very broad wire fraud statute.
And for what it's worth, Swartz had been spending a lot of time thinking about suicide for years before the whole JSTOR debacle http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/dying
>Two things can be true at once: what Swartz did was in fact cool and laudable, it still shouldn't be legal. Similarly, a reasonable person might consider it cool and laudable to punch a nazi, doesn't mean it should be legal. We live in an age where people call other people Nazis as if uttering the accusation gives them a free pass to infringe on the rights of those people. Even if it could be proven to be true, the facts would not grant them any such right.
Theft and unprovoked assault are neither cool nor legal. I don't care if we're talking about absolute assholes, either. For each and every one of us, there is probably someone in the world who thinks that they should have our property and have the right to attack us.
>Swartz killed himself, so the CFAA must be bad, but it's probably realistic to assume that Swartz did not kill himself because he was scared of spending a few months in prison. He was likely seriously mentally ill, and a victim of the poor state of the US healthcare system, not of the CFAA or the DOJ.
Idk that much about this case. It seems to me that Swartz was in a hell of a lot of trouble, that could have gotten him a prison term along with financial and career ruination. He clearly should not have killed himself but that kind of stress can make people lose sight of the future.