
Philip Greenspun: Aaron Swartz - soundsop
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/01/12/aaron-swartz/
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diminish
“Generally the minimum cost to defend a federal criminal lawsuit is $1.5
million.”

Wow, the US justice does really need a reform.

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bokonist
That is appalling. Effectively, by simply charging someone with a crime, the
government is actually immediately _convicting them of a crime_ with a de
facto punishment of a $1.5 million fine. Forcing someone to pay $1.5 million
to defend themselves, is, in and of itself, depriving that person of property
without due process of law, and therefore a violation of the fifth amendment.

~~~
anoncow
Why is anybody not fixing it? Nobody even talks about it. A large majority of
the tech world supported Obama. But the issue of piracy, prosecution and law
never ever came up. Why is nobody bothered? When will this shit end?

~~~
rdtsc
> A large majority of the tech world supported Obama.

I didn't. Fuck Obama. He had voted to give retroactive immunity to telecom
companies for spying on American citizens when he was a senator. That showed
his true character. Everything else was just marketing.

He even got awarded the "Marketer Of The Year" award from AdAge. Beating Nike,
Coke, and Apple. Since then I feel largely my hunch has turned out to be true.
We are still at war, we are still engaged in extra-judicial rendition, we
spend our tax money trying to show 25 year old programmers in jail for 30+
year for downloading scientific papers, the list goes fuck.

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espeed
I had forgotten that Aaron was the 12 year old whom won the ArsDigita prize.
Thank you Philip.

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rokhayakebe
Alas, people who suggest fighting terrorism with Anything other than terrorism
do not have the slightest understanding of terrorism. You can try and be the
bigger man, but please just understand that you will not stop anyone. If this
wasn't true, we would not have armies in just about every country on earth,
because, well, you need tanks to fight someone with guns, and guns to fight
someone with knives. A government that requires you to have a minimum of $1.5
million to start to defend your liberty is anything other than a democracy.

Sadly, my friends, the way in which we want to fight this condition is not
through firing (1) person, or signing petitions. That will only allow people
to talk about it for a little while until Lil Wayne drops another album, then
it is off to other news.

They have proved to us they can use "their" laws to force a young man into
taking his own Life. While the answer is not to take another life, it is to
hit them where they can feel it without hurting them physically.

I suggest Anonymous.

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kleiba
_The lawyers asked me “Why would someone download a huge body of academic
journal articles?” (my response was “I would be guessing but my best guess
would be that they wanted to experiment with some kind of text processing
algorithm. [...])_

Is it really so difficult to imagine for some people that perhaps he simply
wanted to give the world free access to information?

