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

“Swartz’ use case was the dissemination and archival of knowledge; Meta’s use case is powering up their proprietary plagiarism code.”

Swartz downloaded about 70 gigabytes from JSTOR and faced 35 years and a million dollar fine. Meta torrented roughly 81.7 terabytes of pirated books and faces a settlement. That is more than a thousand times the volume for a fraction of the exposure. The difference is not the act. The difference is that one of them had a legal department and a market cap.