What's this about?
The day's top HN story revisits the federal prosecution of Aaron Swartz — the RSS co-creator, who faced decades of potential prison time for bulk-downloading academic papers and died by suicide in 2013 — against the fact that large AI companies now scrape at vastly greater scale with little consequence.
What exactly was the legal theory, and why does scale change it?
Swartz was charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, a law from 1986 written around "unauthorized access" — a phrase broad enough that violating a website's terms of service could be construed as a federal crime. He downloaded papers from JSTOR through MIT's network, which he was entitled to access, at a volume that violated the terms. The asymmetry the thread identifies isn't that the law changed. It's that prosecutorial discretion is applied to a graduate student and not to a company whose scraping is central to a trillion-dollar industry, with a legal budget to match.
What's the community saying?
- The detail that carries the most weight: JSTOR itself declined to pursue civil litigation. It was the US government that prosecuted, with little downside in his case and enormous downside in a case against Meta at scale.
- "Too big to scrape." The thread's compressed version: if you're sufficiently large you can get away with any crime, by making it legally non-crime.
- The prosecutors were named, repeatedly, which is the form this anger has taken for over a decade.
- A concrete proposal, unusual for this thread: in Commonwealth countries private prosecutions are possible, and several wished for a mechanism to force the question of unequal enforcement even if it rarely succeeded.
- The analogies broadened, comparing it to environmental enforcement against individuals versus corporations — the recurring pattern of scale converting a crime into a cost of business.