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FBI Investigates Liberator of Court Records
eldavojohn writes "Federal court documents aren't free to the public, they cost $0.08/page through a system called PACER. During a period when the US Government Printing Office was trying out free access at a number of courthouses around the US, a 22-year-old programmer named Aaron Swartz installed a small PERL script at the 7th US Circuit Court of Appeals library in Chicago — a script that uploaded a public document every three seconds to Amazon's EC2 cloud computing service. Swartz then donated over 19 million documents to public.resource.org. That's when the FBI took interest in the programmer responsible for this effort and ran his name through government databases. How did he discover this? His FOIA was approved, of course, and he received the FBI's partially redacted report on himself. The public.resource.org database was later merged with that of the RECAP Firefox extension, which we discussed a couple of months back." Update: 10/06 18:22 GMT by KD: Timothy Lee pointed out that the summary as originally posted garbled the Swartz / RECAP connection. Improved now.
No. Especially in this instance, as the service wasn't rendered. If you pay for Document X, the money doesn't go to the people who did whatever work went into that document, it goes to the reproduction office.
Can you cite this or did you just make it up? All the infrastructure that makes the documents available, scanned them in, store them, bandwidth, power, man-hours, backups, etc. COSTS MONEY. And you know what? They are entitled to it. You don't get to ask people to work for free.
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Well, such communistic activities are clearly un-american...
Sure, you have a massive army, question is, do you really need it to be that massive? Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if there are countries with less inhabitants than your army has soldiers, not to mention bullets. There are a lot of things about your nation that i find puzzling though, you have rampant spending on the military, yet I've heard some horror stories (here on slashdot even!) about your healthcare, public education and wellfare that could be solved with diverting a part of that budget towards these things. Oh well, blame it on cultural differences