Aaron Swartz was charged on July 14th, 2011 with wire fraud and computer fraud (under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). He potentially faced 30 years in jail and a fine of 1 million dollars or more. The theory was that he exceeded authorized access by automated scraping through 4.8 million JSTOR articles.

Contrast with...

AI crawlers crawl trillions of documents, often ignoring any ToS the prohibit automated scraping.

OpenAI downloaded pirated books from Library Genesis and created internal datasets that became the foundation for GPT-3's training.

Meta torrented 80+ TB of data from Anna's Archive for Llama 4. There are records of internal discussions at Meta that the data set was known to be pirated content.

Where is the federal prosecutor to throw charges at OpenAI and Meta? That's right. No charges.