donald trump gets 10 warnings for intimidating witnesses and indefinite trial postponement for hoarding and most likely leaking classified documents. Sweet sweet justice.
Look, the kid was a hero, but this is also patently false.
He was not sentenced to 35 years. The trial hadn’t started. 35 years was the maximum possible sentence. He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected.
We don’t need to spin lies to make his story more tragic than it already is.
He didn’t even share them as far as I know, he just downloaded them. And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
He didn’t get the chance to share them because he was caught downloading them, and his download requests were getting blocked.
And to be clear, he wasn’t downloading from the Internet as one might download a car, he went into a restricted networking closet and connected directly to the switch, leaving a computer sitting there sending access requests. He had to keep going back to it to check on the progress, which is when they caught him.
And the trial hadn’t started yet when he committed suicide.
Yeah, I agree with the sentiment of the post, but this is just wildly misleading. He was not sentenced to anything, he committed suicide before the trial.
He was given a plea deal for 6 months that he rejected, in an effort to make the feds justify the ludicrous charges they were pressing. Had it gone to trial, he certainly wouldn’t have been found not guilty, but it’s unlikely many of those charges would have stuck. It’s extremely unlikely he would actually have served 35 years.
Oil CEOs pay fines for bringing about a global climate catastrophe. Fascist politicians are given slaps on the wrist for an attempted coup d’etat. Government officials openly commit gross violations of privacy and suffer no consequences.
But a guy hacks a university network and downloads a hoard of scientific articles that should have been freely accessible to begin with and he gets 35 years in prison. I’ll admit I wasn’t familiar with this case before I saw this picture. Which is kind of insane in and of itself.
Remember Kim Dotcom? He had a file sharing website and the police raided his house with guns like he was a dangerous criminal. There is a video of it on YouTube.
Honestly I had forgotten about the whole MegaUpload stuff.
Given, Kim Dotcom had a long history of being a trash person before the MegaUpload raid; Trading in stolen credit card info, embezzlement, black-hat hacking, etc… But he definitely didn’t deserve to get swatted just because he hosted a site that was popular with media pirates. The police used his prior convictions as justification for their heavy-handed tactics. But the reality is that they likely would have gone in with SWAT even if he had a squeaky clean record beforehand.
Articles paid for by the public through grants btw
With authors often paying for open access publications literally out of their very own money, not just grants.
Not at the time this happened. Aaron’s case was one of the motivating factors that led to the Open Access publication movement gaining enough traction that authors could publish that way. JSTOR access is paid for and administered on college campuses by libraries and librarians as a whole field felt terrible both about the paid publication system and the way Aaron was treated. As a community of professionals, the Librarian and Information Science community pushed very hard for the adoption of Open Access publishing into the Academic community.
Please don’t spread misinformation.
Edit: Why is anyone downvoting this? The text is inaccurate and should not be posted.
What about this is misinformation?
It is not true that he was sentenced to 35 years in prison by US authorities for transferring and sharing scientific articles from JSTOR. It is true that he killed himself.
After googling it it seems he was charged and those were the estimate of years if convicted so
So?
Looks likely he would have been convicted, especially considering the whole suicide thing??
Basically the same thing, calling it misinformation implies its creating a perception of the incident that is unwarranted, where I would disagree that the distinction has any merit
I am genuinely disappointed that on an ostensibly science-related message board I see comments along the lines “this isn’t actually true, but it kinda-sorta is, therefore, inaccurate claims somehow aren’t misinformation”. If all kinds of counter-factual things were true, then all kinds of things would be true: what is the point of this hand-waving to defend something that is riddled with untruths? Also, with whom did he purportedly share these documents? In 22 words, this person got no fewer than two things wrong and you are carrying water for what reason?
Law is not science, it’s politics. This is a political distinction, not a matter of the laws of reality
Their comment wasn’t a dissertation, i didn’t expect extreme precision, I’m defending the spirit in which I believe that comment was posted, because I agree with it, simple as
