Aaron Swartz prosecuted for scraping, Meta gets away with it: the hypocrisy of today's web

An acid tweet highlights the paradox: Aaron Swartz, co-creator of RSS, was prosecuted to the point of suicide for "scraping" academic articles. Today, Meta massively scrapes the web to train its AIs—without legal consequences.

A post on Hacker News this morning hits hard. The author is upset—and honestly, we get it.

The topic: Aaron Swartz, co-creator of RSS and a legendary figure in the open web, was prosecuted by the U.S. Department of Justice for mass-downloading academic papers from JSTOR via the MIT network. The legal pressure contributed to his suicide in 2013 at the age of 26.

The paradox: today, Meta scrapes vast swaths of the web to train its AI models—including, according to multiple reports, copyrighted books and protected content—without facing comparable legal consequences. The disparity in treatment is striking.

What this reveals

This isn’t just about individual justice. It’s a systemic issue: the rules of the game on the web apply differently depending on whether you’re an individual, an activist, a startup, or a megacorp. Scraping to share knowledge → federal lawsuit. Scraping to train a profitable LLM → business as usual.

The co-creator of RSS, no less. The irony is complete.

A tool, what it does, in practice: the original post is on curiousquail.blog—a 5-minute read that sets the record straight on who the "free" web really protects.

Free/libre: yes, a blog post, free to read.

Try it here: curiousquail.blog