Aaron Swartz was prosecuted for scraping, while Meta does it without consequence

Aaron Swartz was prosecuted and driven to suicide for downloading 70 gigabytes of academic articles from JSTOR, facing charges of up to 35 years imprisonment and $1 million in fines, while Meta has downloaded 80 terabytes of books to train AI models with minimal legal consequences. The disparity highlights how the legal system treats individual activists attempting to share knowledge differently than corporations using similar methods for profit-driven purposes.