Think about Aaron Swartz, and now realize the balls and execution it took for Larry and Sergey to do Google Books. They got big enough that Google's "only" risk was a civil lawsuit. Had they been smaller, they would have been risking some ambitious federal prosecutor charging Google with wire fraud. Indeed, it's kind of lucky that someone like Ortiz wasn't around to throw the book at Alta Vista and early search engines for scraping sites too aggressively or without permission (before robots.txt became mainstream as a distributed solution without as much need for a centralized regulator).
As it was, DOJ did get involved in the Google Books case, pushing for a harsher civil settlement against Google:
I don't mind at all ambitious, overzealous and over-exuberant prosecutors. That is all right. Even great. But people do suffer when government officials are trying to protect their own carriers and acting out of egoism; or ignorance.
> "his case went before the judge. When his attorney returned and said the case would be dismissed if he agreed not to take any legal action against Darlington County law enforcement, he said, he reluctantly agreed"
To some extent I agree. Justice should not be a result of prosecutors pulling punches, but of a justice system that allows for a robust defence to succeed consistently over a harsh prosecution.
The problem with letting prosecutors not prosecute to the full extent of the law on their own judgement allows for selective favouritism, like white college kids getting off with a warning where a black street kid gets serious time.
Relying on prosecutors to be lenient or "do the right thing" places the defence in the wrong hands - a court that allows a strong defence to succeed over or moderate a prosecution should be at the heart of the justice system.
The real WTF is that local law enforcement thought that they might have the right to shoot down the glider. The guys that give you tickets for speeding shooting their guns in the air over a nuclear power plant? What could go wrong with that?
The plant will be fine. The workers might not be so fine.
Also while I'm sure there would be no problems with the nuclear part, there are things in and around a power plant that being struck by bullets might be... inconvenient.
I don't find the two analogous. Aaron would not have been charged with wire fraud if he had asked JSTOR, even if the original content owners tried to sue him. However, he did not secure any kind of consent and it becomes a different situation. Not saying what I think happened was right but I don't think it is the same.
The Association of American Publishers and Google’s
agreement last week to settle the publishers’ long-running
litigation over Google’s library scanning program put an
end to the lengthy and expensive suit, but without
resolving any of the underlying copyright and fair use
issues. The main component of the deal: copyright owners
with books scanned by Google under its library program can
choose to “opt out” of the program and have their books
removed. Of course, that settlement condition is something
Google has offered copyright owners with books in the
program all along.
In other words, Google scanned and posted to the web first, and authors could opt-out if they so chose. So they didn't get consent first. Their rationale was good - there was no machine readable contact information and many of the authors were dead or had moved - but in this respect the situations are reasonably analogous.
Had Aaron scraped say 10-100k rather than 4M articles and done some innovative NLP/data mining on the text (like Google N-grams), then showed that to JSTOR, despite the lack of up-front consent he might well have been able to get more or convince them to open up, especially if this 10-100k experiment showed monetization potential and could allow JSTOR to move to an open access model. Sadly, we'll never know.
Think about the fact that before they started Apple Jobs and Woz were heavily involved in phone phreaking. What would they be doing instead if they had begun their careers today? Would they have dared to do the sort of things that Aaron did? And if the criminal justice system came down on them back then as hard as it did on Aaron today would Apple computer, or NeXt, or Pixar, etc. even exist today?
Aaron was not a bad guy, nor did he seem to ever act with malicious intent. He broke some rules, certainly, but should the punishment for rule breaking be the destruction of someone's life or should it be just enough of a push to make them avoid rule breaking while keeping them a productive member of society?
Thanks for the reply, but I already made it clear that I don't agree with how the case was handled. My only objection us that the analogy has a pretty big hole.
"Think about Aaron Swartz, and now realize the balls and execution it took for Larry and Sergey to do Google Books."
This thread is about Aaron. But please do not tie the two cases together; at best Google (making $10 Billion a year in profit) scanned the books so they could wrap their content with ads. At worst....
Why didn't Google open source the scans if they wanted to "spread knowledge"?
His point still rings true - even if Aaron was in it for the free exchange of information and Google was in it for the ad revenue, it's a foregone fact in the USA that the justice you receive is proportional to nothing but your cash reserves.
His other point is true but the facts are different. If Aaron had gone to the library, scanned 10 books and posted them online it would be different. Maybe a DCMA or a lawsuit.
Aaron was accused of breaking into MIT and a few other things. It's just a bad comparison on all levels IMO.
But yeah, having billions at your disposal and a great reputation can do wonders. The Feds cannot outspend you and they it's very hard to vilify you
Because they were already being sued by the authors of the books and couldn't push it any further? Google Books offers many out-of-print books and is very much in the spirit of what Aaron was doing.
As it was, DOJ did get involved in the Google Books case, pushing for a harsher civil settlement against Google:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-10357097-265.html