The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was one of the oddest most bizarrely specific media manufactured scandals that conveniently focused very narrowly and utterly ignored the bigger picture, much like the media are currently doing with something else.
> CA is a scandal primarily due to account escalation, I thought. Not about who got elected
It quite clearly wasn't, and that's the point, for the simple reason "Account escalation" isn't/wasn't a thing, there were simply no controls on anyone at all, which is why the Cow Clicker game got everything as well.
As the parent commenter observed the Obama campaign were being promoted as geniuses for their online ad strategies that worked with information obtained this way. It only became a scandal when the others learned how to do it.
lol. Every time one of these ppl says something like that, it's because he just came out of a meeting where he learned that his direct US rival is beating him... So he is suddenly interested in regulation. We've been there with Altman, Musk, etc already. But at the time Anthropic was ahead :-)
No, Altman and Musk have already said that they agree with Dario this time. As you can see upthread, people have already developed a novel conspiracy theory to account for that, as I'm sure they'll continue doing up to and beyond the realm of superintelligence.
I don't think this true. If I throw a brick out my window and it hurts someone, I can still be held criminially liable, even if I didn't mean to do it.
Do drunk drivers intionally kill people on the road?
Not a lawyer, but the other responder definitely isn’t either.
Whether intent is required is down to how the law is written. For many offenses “strict liability” applies, where intent is not required, they only have to prove you did it, not what your intent was.
DUI is typically a strict liability crime. They don’t need to prove that you intended to drive drunk, only that you did drive drunk.
A strict liability crime is something of an oxymoron. Crimes always require intent, the mens rea element. The question is intent for what. If somebody drugged you without your knowledge and you were charged with a DUI, you would have a defense--no intent to become intoxicated.
The strict liability means once you choose to become intoxicated, you're liable for driving intoxicated, even if in some other context your intoxication would mean you couldn't form the requisite intent for something, e.g. have sex.
If there's too much distance between the act you intend to do and the strict liability acts that complete the crime, then the crime would be considered unconstitutional.
Criminal law in common law systems emerged from tort law, so there are many parallels, including the notion of strict liability. (Thus the old axiom about crimes being an offense to the king, specifically an injury to the peaceful society he's ostensibly trying to maintain.) But criminal law has a moral dimension that is absent or muted in other areas, so strict liability could never be as expansive as in tort law or regulatory law.
That is just not true. You can be held liable for DUI even if you did not intend to become intoxicated (though this may vary somewhat state-by-state). Speeding is another example - you do not need to intend to go over the speed limit, it just matters that you did it. The only possible exception would be duress or necessity, but those are affirmative defenses, which are separate from the elements of the offense.
As a summary of American criminal jurisprudence I'm willing to stand by what I said. But I'll admit some caveats:
1) Traffic-related laws straddle the boundary between civil/regulatory law and criminal law. Someone losing their driver's license or even paying a penalty for involuntary intoxication would still be consonant with criminal law principles. However, a criminal punishment would be aberrational. (Distinction between a civil penalty and criminal punishment usually turns on whether there's a moral purpose to the sanction. Jail time is usually but not always--cf civil contempt incarceration--considered a criminal punishment.)
2) Background principles notwithstanding, in theory a state could completely dispense with any morality-colored mens rea requirement, just as the UK Parliament could do whatever it wants to. The backstop would be Federal constitutional [substantive] due process guarantees.
2.a) Some quick searching shows that Texas nominally seems to have dispensed with this requirement for DWIs. See e.g. Farmer v. State, 411 S.W.3d 901 (Tex. Crim. App. 2013) and some discussion at https://www.ncdd.com/top-dui-attorneys-blog/involuntary-into... Without having fully read the case law, though (but some summaries of that and other cases), I suspect there might be some nuance that has allowed this to stand without a full majority accepting that the traditional principles have been completely thrown out. For example, even if someone didn't know they were taking Ambien, the simple act of voluntarily taking any pill without careful examination can be construed as a sufficiently culpable act. Still, it's a pretty big caveat.
2.b) Statutory rape is a classic strict liability crime. But most states will permit a mistake-of-fact defense. Some don't, but even there there's sometimes some nuance and rationalizing going on and the literature is crazy complex. Because this is a "think of the children" situation, most case will just have horrible facts.
3) A few states have nominally dispensed with insanity defenses, though Kansas stands out the most. SCOTUS upheld Kansas' law in Kahler v. Kansas, but in the majority opinion Kagan characterized the Kansas law as not abolishing the insanity defense but rather changing its shape, and she showed that there still remained elements for which a defendant could plea lacked the requisite intent. Also, regarding the Federal constitution acting as backstop, she reiterated that SCOTUS was reticent to establish strict metes & bounds about the general principles of criminal law that states could not stray beyond. Nonetheless, those principles clearly exist.
I had some other points, but now I've forgotten them. Also, minor pedantic point, but like "strict liability crime", some scholars consider "affirmative defense" to be oxymoronic. As a substantive matter there's not a strong distinction. It's a procedural distinction about initial burdens of proof, but in most if not all cases you can interpret an affirmative defense as simply placing a very weak initial burden on the prosecution that is implicitly met.
(Note, I'm not a practicing lawyer but do have a law degree.)
EDIT: Ah, point 4) Intent was a big sticking point in the Obamacare penalty case, Sebelius. Both the dissent and Roberts (the swing vote) reiterated that you couldn't have a penalty or punishment for doing nothing. (IIRC some of the majority opinions also echoed this.) That is, even in a civil context there has some to be some voluntary act, however remote, that puts someone in a position to be subject to legal liability. But as Roberts pointed out, the taxing power is the great exception, where you can be required to do something merely for existing, and thus penalized for not doing nothing properly. (And Roberts was the critical swing vote.)
EDIT EDIT: Also see, "Solving General and Specific Intent: A Mapping on the MPC and Applications to the Categorical Approach", https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4754469 In describing the distinctions between general and specific intent in criminal law, it also delves into the definitions of strict criminal liability (which can be construed as either very similar or identical to general intent crimes), and notes that SCOTUS generally inserts an implicit mens rea requirement when considering strict liability criminal statutes.
> A strict liability crime is something of an oxymoron. Crimes always require intent, the mens rea element.
This is wrong.
In criminal and civil law, strict liability is a standard of liability under which a person is legally responsible for the consequences flowing from an activity even in the absence of fault or criminal intent on the part of the defendant.
Fairly certain that the entire point of strict liability is that mens rea is not required for certain crimes. As in, if I meant to travel at 70 and was instead doing 100 it doesn’t matter that I sincerely meant not to speed and did not know I was speeding, I can still be convicted even if the judge believes I had no intent.
The way we use mens rea in our legal system is more like "mind of the criminal," not outright literal intent.
Negligence can be "unintentional" but still land you in the realm of having a guilty criminal mind.
I find it to be a reasonable take. If you're accidentally going 100 in a 70 (which is a misdemeanor in california), you're not being a careful enough driver, and we deem that lack of care criminal.
Strict liability literally is crimes that don't require a guilty mind.
That's different (sometimes) when, for example, you're found guilty of criminal negligence leading to someone being injured.
Prosecutors don't have to demonstrate that you intended for someone to get hurt for that, your mens rea is that you should have perceived the danger of what you were doing but didn't.
edit: reading your other comments in this thread, maybe I missed your point, in which case, whoosh.
> As in, if I meant to travel at 70 and was instead doing 100 it doesn’t matter that I sincerely meant not to speed and did not know I was speeding, I can still be convicted even if the judge believes I had no intent.
IANAL but from what I've looked up in the last there's at least willfulness that matters for these things. For example if you could prove that happened because your car accelerator pedal broke and you had no opportunity to react, I'm pretty sure you would not be guilty, strict liability or not.
Intent is the difference between murder and manslaughter, in that case. Drunk driving is common enough that prosecutors will argue that getting drunk in a situation where you have to drive is intent. Get OpenAI convicted of unintentional CFAA first, then say that the negligence qualifies as intent, I suppose.
What good has done his pardon? Was it done out of policy, or just because Ulbricht paid for it with his hidden stash of crypto? Is trying to buy hitmen to assassinate someone something that Ulbricht regrets and will never try again?
(It is weird to say "a person you don't like politically" after that very person made everyone the same night at the RNC conference pledge allegiance to himself and to win by any means necessary, including cheating. Is "destroying democracy" a political disagreement we should get over with?)
"Wikipedia is centralized and transparent. Wikipedia pages have unique URLs with an attached edit history. Changes can be made for free, by anyone, and whenever a change is made, everyone immediately has access to it. New information propagates quickly. If an error is introduced, you can undo or correct the change as needed."
Changes can't be made by 'anyone'. There are now zealous content moderators that will block changes they don't like on almost every major wiki entry.
It has the illusion of being free, so the narrative can be changed by a few people. I stopped using Wikipedia as a real source of information years ago.
Whether or not it should be so, individual pirates are routinely taken to court, jailed, given insanely harsh punishments in an attempt to make them an example/deterrent, etc.
"Should piracy be illegal?" is a different question than, "given that the court has decided piracy is illegal, should this law be enforced equally?"
It is not hypocrisy to say that, if piracy is theft is a crime, corporations do not get to do it either. Especially not at many times the scale achieved by the owner and operator of a pirate streaming service.
The alternative is letting corporations be above the law. At that point, the law ceases to be a system of justice and instead becomes only a tool of oppression.
While you might view it as hypocrisy, keep in mind that users of HN are not one hive mind all having the same position, you you should expect a diversity of ideas and voices. Even an individual human routinely holds contradictory beliefs or principles simultaneously.
Is there a way to split the difference in that one is a profit driven (questionably, maybe, at this point) paid service basing itself on the consumption of that copyrighted information, whilst the other had no profit incentive whatsoever and was also a private individual?
There's also the fact that the copyright owners in this case are pushing for trial, whilst in the Aaron Swartz situation, JSTOR was not.
Just in having written that out I've convinced myself they're not really comparable cases, where I kinda thought they were after reading your comment.
It's not actually difficult to see how this works.
"Piracy" means "doing stuff some particular IP rightsholders (or sometimes, upstream/downstream stakeholders) don't like". The fact that a behavior is "piracy", like the fact that a behavior is permitted by a copyright license, doesn't tell us anything about whether that behavior is pro-social.
One key strand of Aaron Swartz' life work was the expansion, strengthening, and maintenance of the commons of intangible and intellectual goods (a "creative commons", if you will!). The "piracy" he was engaged in before he was harassed and threatened into suicide was an attempt to reclaim for direct and free use by the public the output of collectively funded public research. You can argue that he was operating outside the rules of the system, and that this is anti-social in some sense, but I think the fact that Swartz was also actively involved in copyright reform projects gives him a stronger case that what he was working on was a kind of protest or direct action designed to accompany and further broader reform efforts, not just thoughtless chaos or showboating.
What the frontier labs have done with these copyrighted works is create something for themselves that they then lease the use of to the rest of us for a profit. The same characteristics that make their task "transformative" in the eyes of the courts are the ones that make it opaque to us, that stop it from being part of the commons.
I could say more but I'm tired of typing on my phone on a holiday and, frankly, it feels obvious enough.
We (the collective "we" of all humanity) clearly lost massively when we let a handful of billionares get richer by saying they got to control all sharing, remixing, performing, using or expanding upon any music, art, or other media.
Not that it's any real justice for Swartz or the countless others who've had their lives ruined by copyright laws or for file-sharing, but it's a tiny step in the right direction if we drastically expand fair-use and rethink if we really want a society where the 0.01% control music, film and art.
Aaron Swartz was murdered by a company that prints scientific journals that paywall papers paid for with US government grants; his "crime" was using the access granted to him by MIT, legally. At no point did he break any laws nor the license granted to him by the paywall service.
OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta all _knowingly_ pirated Copyrighted works en masse, knowing they did not have a license to do so, and then distributed those works, again, knowing they did not have a license to do so.
I do not think anyone should be murdered by the state, but the difference between Aaron Swartz and Sam Altman is one of them did it to fix a great injustice, the other did it as a fly-by-night get rich scheme.
Notice the one that did things legally got murdered, while the criminal continues to walk the streets.
Odd how that works.
reply