That's not the same as piracy though. He wasn't downloading millions of scientific papers from libgen or sci-hub, he was downloading them directly from jstor. Indeed, none of his charge was for copyright infringement. It was for stuff like "breaking and entering" and "unauthorized access to a computer network".
No, they couldn't, since the then-novel and untested strained interpretation of the CFAA that the prosecutor was relying on has since been tested in the courts and soundly rejected.
I haven’t seen any accusations that they’ve done that, though. Usually people get pirated material from sources that intentionally share pirated material.
Part of the accusation comes from the fact that Swartz accessed the downloads through a MIT network closet, which AI companies wasn't doing. The equivalent to that would be if openai broke into a wiring closet at Disneyland to download Disney movies.
The CFAA is vague enough to punish unauthorized access to a computer system. I don't have an example case in mind, but people have gotten in trouble for scraping websites before while ignoring e.g. robots.txt
The CFAA might be vague, but the case law on scraping pretty much has been resolved to "it's pretty much legal except in very limited circumstances". It's regrettable that less resourced defendants were harassed before large corporations were able to secure such rulings, but the rulings that allowed scraping occurred before AI companies' scraping was done, so it's unclear why AI companies in particular should be getting flak here.
Aaron Swartz was not jailed or even charged for copyright infringement. The discussion and the comment I replied to is centered around US companies and jurisdiction.
There could be a moral question. For example a researcher might not want to download a pirated paper and cause loss to a fellow researcher. But it becomes pretty stupid to pay when everyone, including large reputable companies endorsed by the government, is just downloading the content for free. Maybe his research will help developing faster chips to win against China, why should he pay?
Would it be a "fair use" to download pirated papers for research instead of buying?
Also I was gradually migrating from obtaining software from questionable sources to open source software, thinking that this is going out of trend and nobody torrents apps anymore, but it seems I was wrong?
Or another example: if someone wants to make contributions to Wine but needs a Windows for developing the patch, what would be the right choice, buy it or download a free copy from questionable source?
Researchers don't get paid when their papers are downloaded, though. They pay to have their papers downloaded, and the middleman makes money on both sides. Piracy is the only moral option for them. There is a reason every single competent professor in the western world will email you a free copy of their papers if you ask nicely.
And the US is not the only jurisdiction