TL;DR version: It just came out that Meta downloaded via Torrent over 80 terabytes of books taken from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-Library to train their AI models, and nobody is guilty. In contrast, in 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded just 70 GB of academic articles from JSTOR (only 0.0854% of what Meta took) and faced $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison. Unable to bear the situation, he took his own life in 2013.
Full version: Aaron Swartz (November 8, 1986 – January 11, 2013) was a brilliant IT mind. He contributed to the development of RSS, the architecture of Creative Commons, the web.py framework, and even helped define the Markdown syntax. He was also a co-owner of Reddit.
His "crime"? Downloading academic papers to make knowledge freely accessible. The punishment? Potential life in prison.
Now Meta has been reported to have downloaded via Torrent over 80 terabytes of books to train their AI. Seems that not a single executive is facing prison time.
IMO knowledge should be open, free, and accessible to all. Authors should be fairly compensated by governments, ensuring their work remains available to everyone without barriers. This way, authors earn a stable income, and humanity benefits from unrestricted knowledge.
We can't bring back Aaron Swartz, but we can fight for a future where knowledge is truly free.
