skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If there isn't much piracy then there aren't many purchases (often none) so there's no justification for an extension.

But earnings themselves aren't a justification, it's the public good that comes from the further works you create while striving for more royalties that are the justification for this expensive and wasteful bureaucracy.

And there's no reasonable argument for 150y copyright, but the very stories copyrighted (Snow White, etc) are a powerful argument against copyright at all. With modern copyright on the works they borrowed, Disney never would have existed - unable to pay for access to cultural heritage.
On Aaron Swartz and hacktivism
Be careful. One does not really want to send the message to people contemplating suicide that if they complete the suicide that their 'enemies' will loose their job.

Suicide is a terrible short term solution. There are better solutions.
Rewritten? Perhaps not, but he said passed.

There are numerous examples of laws that have 'little innocent white girls' as catalyzing moments, to the extent that they are often named after the victims, if only in popular media. Just from the top of my head and a few seconds on google: numerous proposed "Caylee's Laws", Chelsea's Law, Marsy's Law, Jessica's Law, Megan's Law...

There is a metric bucketload of laws named after people here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws

I don't really feel like filtering that by "young female victim", it would be too depressing.
My understanding is that the system begins faking upvotes and downvotes at a certain point to fool spammers.
FWIW I hope the petition succeeds. It won't result in a resignation but it'll at least force an answer and an examination, if nothing else
Laws are meant to be beneficial to society as a whole. In the US, laws must be passed by a democratically elected body.

The judicial system is one of the few areas where "just doing your job", no matter how 'evil' it may seem, is morally right. Even the most heinous and obviously guilty defendant deserves the best defence available. And similarly, is a prosecutor enforcing a law that society chose to enact inherently evil?

It is far, far better to take all this outrage and anger and direct it towards changing the outdated laws that govern computer crime.
I'm probably missing something, so tell me please.

We are all hackers. As a collective we mourn the loss of a collegue. Someone from our generation who dreamed of changing the world though code and actually did. That is why the community has responded in such way. He is one of us.
> Aaron had the option of going to trial. It was his constitutional right. He chose to kill himself instead.

It was not a real option. He had run out of money for an expensive, complex case. He was sure to lose.
My Grandfather, who was the US Attorney for west Memphis, once explained that prosecuting the law was messy. It was messy because there was rarely a case which hinged on exactly one part of the law or that had circumstances that nicely isolated the principle at stake. He was talking about pornography, and the difficulty of a general consensus that pornography was "bad" and should be outlawed, with the challenge of defining exactly what it was and the actual "bad" part of it.

I see a lot of parallels between his struggle to enforce pornography laws with the current struggle to enforce copyright laws. These situations seem to arise when there is a fundamental disconnect between what "the people" think and what "the system" thinks. "The system" is represented by a codified set of strictures that are put in place by a variety of people representing what they assert are the best interests of "the people." Whereas the people themselves, act in what they consider a rational way given their understanding of or perhaps agreement to, the laws of the land. Finally our system of laws are a combination of written text, and argued cases, and the sum of those is an emergent thing thought of as public policy. When the rational acting people don't consent to the public policy, there is a rash of disobedience, and whether it is alcohol, porn, or copyright, the process of emerging to a consensus is challenging at best.

One possible explanation for the zeal in which this case was pursued may be the lack of confounding factors with respect to copyright infringement, as codified by law. I don't know of course so this is just speculation. Having a clear, published, decision on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of what Aaron was doing might have been seen as a way to clear up a confusing pile of statutes and other decisions. An unambiguous marker between fair use and infringement, or perhaps a litmus test for intent. We'll probably never know.
I feel like I understood it, but it is hard to put into words. I find that strange.

Emotionally it is easier to explain: It makes me feel like I did after the first time I watched American Beauty, read The Yellow Wallpaper, or listened to Bush's Razorblade Suitcase start to finish. Surreal maybe.

Perhaps in this case understanding is more emotion than cognition?
YC alumnus.

edit: he was in the first batch, actually.
>Swartz was guilty. Even Lessig's post decrying Swartz' treatment intimates as much.

I didn't read it as such. I read it as Lessig saying that what prosecutors accused him of doing was a crime, but that Swartz may have informed him of contrary facts in confidence which he was not at liberty to disclose.

Moreover, we don't know that someone is guilty until after they have been convicted, right? Swartz was never convicted (and obviously at this point never will be), so he is innocent until proven guilty.

But your point about distinguishing between guilt under the law and moral culpability is well-taken. I much more strongly care to ensure that the sort of thing Swartz was accused of doing not be illegal than care whether Swartz in actual fact did the thing that I believe should not be illegal.

>In fact, rather than being part of the problem, if juries were so emboldened, they could mitigate many of the injustices of our system themselves through the use of jury nullification.

I don't disagree with that, and it isn't the jury I blame for the outcomes, it's the process. As you mention, the Grand Jury hears from only one side in a sealed proceeding. The outcome of that is entirely predictable. And changing it would be quite welcome, but unless and until we change it, we can't assume that as-implemented it works as the theory says it should, contrary to all available evidence.
Interesting topic. I'd be interested to learning what are the main arguments for the two sides...

I just started this discussion on the topic:

http://www.the-counterpoint.com/discussion/2G
My deepest sympathies for your loss.Aaron was a beacon of light and love and we will never forget him and what he taught us about sharing.
>I just wanted to point out that there are REAL depressions

Ah, sure, we agree, there are real depressions.

I just wanted to point out that the absurd numbers of depressions one heres (up to 20-30% of the population) are based non on clinical conditions but on a personal life and/or society out of balance, and are fixable by fixing those, instead of treating the person.
The inspiring heroism of Aaron Swartz
Here's a link:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...

And a second petition to pardon Aaron:

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/posthumously-pardo...
I'd certainly agree that all the teams that completed the Grand Challenge did a good job, whether they finished first or fifth.

Although DARPA rules require that the team have an American representative, teams like Team Berlin [1] and CarOLO [2] were run by German universities. I certainly agree that universities produced a lot more entries than the vehicle industry did - but I don't know if that means Mercedes and Toyota had secrets they didn't want to give away in 2005, or if it means they didn't have anything worth showing off.

Of course, we'll know much more when companies actually start bringing these products to market, and we shouldn't count Google's chickens before they've hatched. But by my reckoning they got a pretty good head start - I certainly wouldn't bet against them.

[1] http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/Teams/Teamberlin.asp
[2] http://archive.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/Teams/CarOLO.asp
Carmen Ortiz was the person in charge of either (a) not employing people like Stephen Heymann, or (b) overseeing their activities better.

Of course, Stephen Heymann should also bear the blame. But we don't help society when we refuse to find those in charge responsible for the things they actually are responsible for.
Hate the game or play the game.

Destroying her reputation. Stripping her of every professional friendship by making her a pariah. Piling on in every conceivable forum against her. Making it cost her every every she ever earned, her home, her retirement, and every penny of any family member willing to help her would be perfectly fitting and proportionate in that light.

And yet you will see people here say "Write a note to your Congressman" and that should be the limit of it. Bah.
> you can't blame federal prosecutors for doing their fucking jobs

Many people who committed atrocities were just following orders or doing their job.
It's not an issue of paying taxes. We have a responsibility and a duty to control our government and our political systems and to direct them to the ends of justice. Whether or not we pay our taxes, we still have this duty.

That's what makes this so tragic. Aaron Swartz was one of the few people willing to actually do this, even when it meant poking at a sleeping bear, one that, in the end, he couldn't face.
The StoneHack Challenge 2013
Devs,

Are you game for the StoneHack Challenge 2013?

The mission: to build prototype apps in a day from ideas by teachers.

The venue: Stone Computers stand at the BETT show.

Full details here: bit.ly/nWgBok

Register here: lanyrd.com/cktgm

cheers
Milverton
12/01/2013
That's a crapshoot. Either they will get the local media to care about it for a day or two, then fizzle, or they will get the local pizza place really pissed off, or someone will do something drastic and a bunch more arrests will start being made.

Getting 4chan to apply the right amount of pressure to the right place seems to be like trying to get an apathetic redneck to remove a tree stump for you. Chances are he's either going to whack it a few times with an axe and declare it unmovable, or blow it up. (To be fair, blowing it up works great, but can get people in trouble rather easily)
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What if the potential shooter was a parent on their way to rescue a child from a kidnapper? What if the shooter was a police officer and had merely lost their uniform in a comic mishap while chasing a vicious killer?

If you try to stop someone who is looking to shoot someone they disagree with (regardless of their reasoning), presumably by calling in the police or other agents employing lethal force, you're ultimately just shooting people you disagree with by proxy.

If you believed words were a better solution than violence you'd need to talk, and accept the results of that discussion, instead of drawing lines and deciding to perpetrate your own violence.

Pacifists can't call the police or they're merely cowards.
"Your death won''t stop the pain ... your family, your friends will never recover"

This thought has stopped me from attempting suicide more times that I can remember. Fortunately, the one time that I did try was a failure, and the reactions of my family were enough to make me vow to tough it out, no matter what.

Aaron's family and friends have my sympathy. The truly creative lead troubled lives, because they see what could be, not what is. He was truly creative, and acted on his beliefs.
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The truth is that every prosecutor faces too many possible cases to actually pursue, and so has to choose which ones to focus on. A prosecutor may try to be neutral, but the basic act of triage forces you to show your biases.

In this case Aaron stuck a laptop in an unlocked closet, used curl to download lots of links, and did absolutely nothing to hide his tracks because he did not think he was doing anything wrong.

She looked at the facts, and decided to press forward with charges regardless when she had more important things she could have focused on instead, and when the company whose documents were "stolen" (and never distributed) wanted to drop charges. Why?
Prosecuting someone for breaking laws against breaking into computer networks and violating copyright isn't an atrocity.
From Riker in TNG: "When has justice ever been as simple as a rule-book?"
"Just the idea that all prosecutors are slaves to these laws is so incredibly naive I almost don't know what to say to you"

You are implying things that I did not say.

Please quote specifically what I said that gives you the impressions that I am "so incredibly naive". In other words indicate where I said or implied that prosecutors don't have discretion and what that has to do with what I did say which had to do specifically with the person "harmed".
Timothy McVeigh blew up children. We are proposing someone lose their job.

Hyperbolic much?
I plant seeds for others to think about and hopefully replant.
Note that this does not necessarily imply that she sold her friend out. Prosecutors commonly grant immunity in grand jury cases whether or not the witness asked for or wanted it, because it deprives him of the legal basis for invoking the Fifth Amendment. Testimony can then be compelled under threat of contempt.

If this sounds shady, that's because it is.
What do you expect to understand? This is a morbid story written by someone who committed suicide. Or are you talking about a higher meaning of the writing?
Not only that but the actual trespassing charge was dropped. So it wasn't even part of the case!
> "We were just following orders" and "We were just doing our jobs" and "We were doing what the law told us to do" aren't the indefensible moral positions you seem to think they are.

Careful; that's a double-edged sword. Would you prefer that individual prosecutors have the authority to ignore the law? That didn't work too well in the pre-civil-rights South, when lynchings went unprosecuted.

It's far better to have a government of laws and not a government of men; then you can assign responsibility where it belongs, with the people who write the laws.
The Truth about Aaron Swartz’s “Crime”
You can't have a tragedy of the commons when the commons belongs to one company. JSTOR isn't a village pool unless it's public, which it isn't.

JSTOR's charges aren't at all proportional to the hosting cost. If they were only charging for hosting then they should be happy if people share the data without using their servers, but they aren't, so it is manifest that they are charging for more than the hosting.

Indexing articles for browsing and search is not a real problem if the information is made public. If other people want to help JSTOR with this, they are not allowed to because JSTOR keeps all this publicly-funded information proprietary in perpetuity
Honestly I don't care if she spends her nights and weekends caring for orphans and war widows. She's a politician who treated Aaron Swartz as a pawn in the political game she is playing.

No doubt she intended for her campaign for governor to describe her as a "staunch defender of intellectual property rights" who, as prosecutor, put a "dangerous hacker behind bars" for "breaking into MIT and stealing millions of dollars of federally funded research."

The Obama administration has thrown better people than her out the airlock because they became political liabilities. We need to add a new rule to the political rulebook that she's playing by. Ending her career is necessary to send a lesson to every other prosecutor who sees a guy like Aaron the way a housecat sees a cornered rat.
There was a 2.5K entry on Reddit, but that is not a requirement or affirmation the community wants. Nor is it what it needs as a matter of fact. I wish that time could be taken back all the way to the day when prosecutors decided to embark on this mission. And sadly, what we need is a change in the justice system. Change big enough, that felons, the type of capital F felons, are prosecuted for their part in melting down global economy. Not dining at the Whitehouse as the article put it.
Ask HN: What is the best content discovery platform and why?
JSTOR declined to proceed forward with criminal action, so most articles I've read about this episode hold them relatively blameless for what the government did to Aaron Schwartz. MIT, and the Prosecutor, on the other hand, do not come out as cleanly. If the "Tyrant" label were to be assigned, it doesn't lack for candidates.
Like many people here, I have been admiring Aaron Swartz from a distance for the past two years.

Why didn't I ever shoot him an email saying "I like what you're doing, thanks for doing it"?

I am disappointed in myself today.
To the people suggesting pinning the blame on a person is ignoring the systemic issues, let me point out this: you can do both. We can both recognize that the system is broken while still recognizing that we need to make it plainly obvious how disappointed we are in the people running it.

Making a petition isn't a lynch mob. These people are public servants, and ostensibly serve at the pleasure of the public. So when tragedies like this happen we need to make it extremely clear how displeased we are.
If you go to court and say "I didn't mean to break the law", he says "too bad." But evidently, you think she should get leniency from us for obliviously (you allege) ruining someone's life.

Screw that.
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Plea bargains should be illegal. If the state doesn't have the resources to try a crime then they shouldn't bother with an indictment.
One of my main hobbies is photography. I do mainly outdoor shots, and really enjoy macros of flowers. The problem being that "oh last weekend I took an amazing shot of a purple flower" isn't all that helpful for someone who is trying to find a picture of an iris. When someone comes up with an algorithm that can take my shot, compare it to a library, and tell me what wildflower it is, I will be a happy camper. I suspect Flickr and 500px will also become more valuable places since it would be possible to correlate geotagged shots with flora to document what seems to be there.
Psychiatric assessment is a routine element of any criminal case. At any rate, it is in the UK.
> And similarly, is a prosecutor enforcing a law that society chose to enact inherently evil?

That's not what happened here: society did not enact laws that made his actions illegal, and certainly did not inact punishments to the extent of a felony and 35 years in prison.

This is perhaps the clearest case I've even seen for prosecutorial abuse (excepting situation where the prosecutions literally fabricates evidence). More info here: http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz...

Bottom line: in this case, society is not to blame and no, the prosecutors weren't just "doing their job".
Compelling testimony isn't "shady". Besides, the defense has the power to compel testimony as well. It's in the Constitution.
Software Karma
http://archive.org/stream/UsaV.AaronSwartz-CriminalDocument2...
I think you missed the URL
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Indeed. Yes, the system is what it is, but prosecutors have huge discretion over who they attack. "The system" is just a machine, like a gun, and she picked that gun up, aimed it at Aaron, and pulled the trigger.
No worries. Nights are best spent trawling through papers, gently blowing one's mind. Always a pleasure finding someone else passionate about cosmology!
Everything did go away for Aaron Swartz, because he's dead.
You aren't going to discourage people from suicide by being harder on the dead. And I don't think it's at all cool to imply that he got what was coming to him.
Delicious, new design.
HN added a farewell black line for Aaron Swartz We noticed
Kill oneself? Why the hell would I do THAT? Yes, humanity sucks. Yes, people are swarms of mindless creatures. Yes, the law is not fair. Yes, politics sucks. Yes, pollution is bad. Yes, children curse and get worse with each generation. Yes, everything is more or less pointless. But I don't fucking care. Life is too good to be being rid of.

And there still are chances I might once again would want to live on this planet.

How I feel about Aaron's (or whoever's) death? I don't fucking care. Seriously. Get over it. He accomplished as much as any other of us (don't ever underestimate yourself) -- it's just very subjective. And he was weak enough to kill himself. Don't think any person committing suicide is worth the praise Aaron is getting.

The fact that HN's front page is full of links more or less related to Aaron's death makes me sad and disappointed and not want to live on this planet anymore.
Worked with SOPA.
What is Zuul?
With all due respect, I think your interpretations are inane, but if Lessig can't convince you of that, I'm sure there's nothing else I can say that will help you understand.
I'm not really a fan of Norton's journalism, but the insinuation you've made here is execrable. You're a typical American, criticizing a victim of our judicial process rather than the evil prosecutors who distort it for their own gain.
The immunity grant needed to compel testimony is also fairly limited. All they have to grant is immunity from the specific compelled statements (and evidence derived from them) being used against the witness in court; that was decided in a 1972 case [1]. The U.S. Supreme Court's reasoning was that, since the 5th amendment only protects withholding statements that might be incriminating, a grant of immunity relating only to those specific statements is sufficient to make compelling them constitutional, because they then can no longer function to legally incriminate. The government can still prosecute the compelled witness in the same case, if they have other evidence.

[1] An old law-review article on the case: http://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=11...
Ending her career would set a very clear precedent that other prosecutors would have no difficulty understanding. N'est pas?
Aaron Swartz has nothing to do with violations of UCMJ or the political impossibility of the executive importing terrorist suspects to the continental US over intense Congressional obstruction.
I feel like this petition could have been written so much more persuasively. Regardless, I signed.
The notion that voicing an opinion is equivalent to fucking lynching of all things is a disease that serves to highlight just how little people actually believe in fundamental ideas backing democracy.

"Restrict your protest to the appropriate democratic channels" is the rallying cry of those who wish to suppress dissident.
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Where's the petition to require free publication and distribution of federally funded academic research? That was the point of that particular exercise in civil disobedience in the first place. What a disappointment--it's like firing a cop for putting Martin Luther King in jail without ever addressing racism.
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Even if there are other overzealous prosecutors in general, getting rid of this one would be an important message. So this is an important step, even in the absence of practically impossible outcomes like decriminalizing copyright infringement.
I didn't even realize that. The most salacious and unsympathetic of the allegations is how Swartz got physical access...othherwise, how different is what he did than what people who go to Starbucks and torrent illegally? Just magnitude?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5048820 or http://unhandled.com/2013/01/12/the-truth-about-aaron-swartz...