# the difference between a dead man and a billionaire one of these men is dead, another is a billionaire ![[Pasted image 20250415160628.png]] i dare to say this is the main difference between them what are the similarities? well they're both male, young, white, jewish, both related to technology, software another similarity is their stance on intellectual property they thought knowledge should be free - but in different ways, which cost one of them his life so aaron swartz thought that knowledge should be free he collected scientific papers from the jstor repository and published them online he was sentenced to 35 years in prison and committed suicide at 26yo while mark zuckerberg founded a tech company, made billions from selling the souls of the users, and then used 197,000 books from the pirated repository to train facebook's ai model - which still turned out to be complete crap he will be slapped on a wrist with some $100 mil fine (perhaps, can't find info as the court proceedings are going on) which he's not paying personally, but his company. it will be deducted from taxable income (i'm sure Facebook is diligently paying its share), thus reducing the corporate tax to the state taxes are interesting taxes are used to fund university research that results in scientific publications publications land in digital libraries like jstor, scopus, pubmed interested readers have to pay $20-50 per paper to read it (albeit more and more papers are indeed available for free or with manageable fees) but wait haven't they paid taxes to fund this research? oh well yes but they also pay an extra $10 for vat, which they do from their net salary after they had already paid some $40k in their $100k per year gross income... unless they're facebook, then they can steal books and it'll be fine aaron swartz hung himself for making knowledge free his crime shouldn't have been a crime in the first place and now, as people like jack dorsey and elon musk are arguing to abolish intellectual property rights, i can only imagine they got incentives to say so and i say no way if those folks are for abolishing ip then normal people and companies besides american big tech, need to protect ip at all costs the system needs to change, and I know too little to make any meaningful proposals - let's contend that it's beyond the scope of this rant in the world built on software and controlled by ai, where ownership of data, compute, and models becomes decisive for accumulation of wealth and power - people like swartz should have a way of staying alive people like zuckerberg, musk, dorsey must be kept in check any suggestions? --- aaron swartz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz swartz death: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-21001452 facebook torrenting books: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/02/meta-defends-its-vast-book-torrenting-were-just-a-leech-no-proof-of-seeding/ facebook cambridge analytics scandal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook%E2%80%93Cambridge_Analytica_data_scandal dorsey on ip: https://x.com/jack/status/1910829254214115681 --- // 15 apr 2025 #ethics