But Aaron Swartz did it for the benefit of other people. These fine people did it to uphold american values and enrich themselves at the expense of others. The law is clearly on their side.
This but unironically. "did it for the benefit of other people" is redistribution, which is straightforward copyright infringement, even if you think it's a laudable act. AI training was the reverse, because courts have so far ruled is fair use. When AI companies were engaging in piracy, they were sanctioned as well.
That just feels like more of a general complaint about how the justice system is set up. The same logic applies to how a $300 speeding ticket "is not in any way a "sanction"" for someone making $1M/year, or even a well paid SWE reading HN.
I feel you but are you possibly conflating civil and criminal justice? Tickets don’t scale with net worth of defendants, but class action penalties often do.
Do they? Or only so far as "if you have 1000x the revenue, you probably also have 1000x the customers that you have wronged, each of which are entitled to damages as well"?
Not sure what that is supposed to indicate? USA was a big place, even then. Most northern states had abolished slavery even before Britain, France, and especially Spain did. Maybe we should have a quick refresher on European values?
> The article talks about European colonies, so would these have been European values then since America did not yet exist?
Slavery is an expression of capitalist values.
Frederick Douglass is Karl Marx's ideological predecessor.
You aren't wrong that the European powers were slavers. That being said, the culture of the 13 American colonies is the first appearance of the unique Euro-American culture that dominates the United States.
It's wrongheaded to deny the central importance of slavery to American culture and values.
In the United States, the land of the small business owner, slaves mixed socially and sexually with their captors and with the culture of their captors.
For this reason, the culture of the United States is deeply affected by the institution of slavery in ways that are alien to the European powers.