Two wrongs don't make a right. If a law is unjust, then what good is there in continuing to punish people who have broken it, just because other people have been punished in the past?
Either you think the law is just or unjust. If you think it's unjust, I don't possibly see how you think people should be punished for it. Meta wasn't responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz.
Motive matters. What Swartz did was in protest for a cause, a form of civil disobedience (which has always been a valid form of protest in democratic societies).
Motive matters when you believe something should be criminal, but there are extenuating circumstances.
But if you don't think something should be illegal to begin with, why do you want to see someone punished? Regardless of motive? If you think it should be allowed, then it should be allowed period, regardless of whether it was to make a quick buck or for civil disobedience. Right?
I totally get who you respect more. What I don't get is "give every tech CEO the Swartz treatment" first. If you don't think what they did should be illegal, then there's just no justification for that.
Motivation, consequences and fairness of how rules are applied are all relevant to the ethics of a particular action.
Meta is systematically abusing copyright law for personal profit, appropriating the labor of hundreds of thousands of authors to line their own pockets without contributing anything back. That free-riding is anti-social behavior, a betrayal of the social contract. A society that permits that without censure isn't going to keep having people create for very long: who is going to create just so billionaires can get richer, with nothing in it for them?
Especially not when the same billionaires sue people for violating copyright of _their_ software. Hypocrisy in service of exploitation and greed is especially noxious.
At the same time, copyright laws are written to benefit those billionaires, keeping our mythology in private hands long past our lifetimes. Put copyright back to thirty years, strip all business methods and software patents (which should never have been a thing in the first place): then Meta will have plenty of content for their LLMs _and_ it's software will start coming out of copyright ten years from now, making an actual contribution to human knowledge instead of just pillaging it.
The central tenet of conservativism is that there is a group the law protects but does not bind and a group the law binds but does not protect. This is what Meta is doing.
They could have gone and lobbied to loosen copyright legislation. Heck, they could have gone through a DMCA exception process, which doesn't even take a new law. Instead, they figure they are powerful enough that society doesn't apply to them.
Two wrongs don't make a right. If a law is unjust, then what good is there in continuing to punish people who have broken it, just because other people have been punished in the past?
Either you think the law is just or unjust. If you think it's unjust, I don't possibly see how you think people should be punished for it. Meta wasn't responsible for what happened to Aaron Swartz.