Aaron Swartz faced prosecution for scraping data that Meta now does freely

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A blog post circulating on Hacker News draws a sharp contrast between the legal treatment of Aaron Swartz and current practices by Meta. Swartz, a co-creator of RSS and internet activist, was federally prosecuted in the early 2010s for scraping academic articles from JSTOR. He died by suicide in 2013 before his case went to trial, facing decades in prison. Meta and other large tech companies now routinely scrape vast amounts of web data to train AI models, largely without legal consequence. The post has reignited debate about the unequal application of internet law and the selective enforcement of data access rules.

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