posted in Technology
Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence
blog.curiousquail.com/im-upset-again-about-a-co-creator-of-rss-being-prosecuted-for-something-meta-is-doing-with-little-consequence/
So scraping means any harvesting of data now?
We need a new name for the fairly painful process of trying to tease meaning out of people’s unstructured HTML.
In any case downloading a bunch of stuff from JSTOR was not scraping. And he absolutely had authorised access to that data. They took exception to the quantity, mainly.
Also that he was planning, or already was, sharing the data for free. They made an example out of him because he believed such data should be for everybody.