to quote Lawrence Lesig “anyone who tells you there is money to be made in a stash of academic articles is either an idiot or a liar” and he’s right. the university or whatever later did make those papers public records. furthermore Schwartz was a member of their network, he just violated the ToS in the way that he accessed the files. Then you have the way they calculate possible sentences for computer crimes where by the initial log in is one count of the crime, opening the folder is another count, accessing a file is a 3rd count and so on. so while each count has a small sentence and fine with it, even minor computer activities will rack up a huge amount of infractions.
you couple that with the broadness of the laws being utilized here and it really begs the question why we don’t see way more of these cases being brought? the logical conclusion is that the law is intentionally broad to allow for targeted prosecutions.
it’s because hackers wield a weapon against corporations and government that they can’t control. Simply put they can’t keep up with the best of the best hackers in the world and it terrifies them. They use these type of cases to intimidate hackers as a whole, especially if you advocate against corporations and government (pretty much one and the same at this point). this makes me so sick, HSBC was found guilty of wire fraud (one of the charges levied) and money laundering for; the mexican drug cartels, Al Qaida and Iran, yet our DOJ let them off with a few million in fines because “arresting the ceo’s would endanger the bank as a whole which would in turn endanger the entire global economy”.
and that’s exactly the control that the rich have spent the last 40 to 50 years working tirelessly to enact, they did it slowly but surely by injecting more and more corporate money into politics and making it more and more legalized. Our media is part and parcel to the plan of course, remember 4 years ago a democratic senator named Evan Bayh? our media was going on and on about how bipartisan he was while he was mucking up the works of the health care legislation as a “blue dog democrat”. well he retired from the senate 2 years ago and was immediately hired by a lobbying firm to work in their DC office (don’t worry though, he totally wasnt a lobbyist, he just oversaw the lobbyists) remember that obama enacted a new law when he took office to limit lobbying for 2 years after leaving congress. Well recently that 2 year period for Bayh ran out… and golly gee i’m shocked to find out that he is now a registered lobbyist.
To quote some of it: “Are decades of incarceration commensurate with the damage Swartz caused, if any? Or even the six-month plea deal that Ms. Ortiz reportedly offered if he copped to all 13 felonies? JSTOR itself settled with Swartz to its satisfaction. If copyright can’t safeguard an outfit like JSTOR and prosecutors can’t distinguish real cyber crimes from an abortive political stunt, then it’s another warning that the U.S. legal architecture for intellectual property is out of date … The Swartz family and others are blaming Ms. Ortiz for his death, which is unfair, given his history of depression. It is fair to say that she showed poor judgment and misused the awesome powers that the government vests in prosecutors.”
these “cases” are not justice or about safeguarding intellectual property. Its about safeguarding the money that companies invest into “their” research, and ensuring that the public can see that people who fuck with " their intellectual property" will be crucified.
These laws are not going to change, and your a fool if you think they are. Medication is reaching an all time high, research is only getting more and more expensive and difficult due to demands from environmental agencies, resources are being more and more stratified by specific countries. There could be a 1 million dollar drug on the market coming soon. The power of the dollar shits on your votes and your democracy.
To turn and tell companies that there methods and or research cannot be patented is seriously going to discourage big firms from investing into new useful medication because their profits are going to take a hit regardless.
Something needs to change, lets start by asking why its so expensive to operate today, then when it was 40-50 years ago. Is it the maximization of profits or something else.
The DoJ needs to have their feet held to the fire on this one, especially when you look at the timing of the prosecution and the way they went about searching for information…
<p>“The world’s entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over
centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and
locked up by a handful of private corporations,” he once wrote.</p>
