Does YouTube allow massive scraping like this in their ToS?
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Who cares at this point? No one is stopping ML sets from being primarily pirated. The current power is effectively dismantling copyright for AI related work.
Anyone who has a shred of integrity. I'm not a fan of overreaching copyright laws, but they've been strictly enforced for years now. Decades, even. They've ruined many lives, like how they killed Aaron Swartz.
But now, suddenly, violating copyright is totally okay and carries no consequences whatsoever because the billionaires decided that's how they can get richer now?
If you want to even try to pretend you don't live in a plutocracy and that the rule of law matters at all these developments should concern you.
His death was a tragedy but it wasn't done to him.
What should the government (executive or judicial) have done differently to balance the needs of the accused vs. the needs of the enforcement and adjudication of the law here?
Perhaps we could craft a way to hold people with mental health issue to the same standards we are all held to while simultaneously being more sensitive to their needs. But in general, his story is an unfortunate tragedy of a sick person who took their own life under a stress that doesn't kill most other people, and we adjust the way we prosecute crime at our own peril. It is, as I said elsewhere, the mother of all Chesterton's Fences. Which is not to say it cannot or should not be improved! Only that it be done with great care.
And to be completely clear: Swartz ripped content via back-dooring a secured network physically, in a closet, and (it is alleged) planned to dump that content in public. We'll never really know since he (or his illness) denied himself his day in court, and that's a tragedy; he may have successfully defended himself, or could have been a living example of persevering anyway like Mitnick instead of a martyr. Companies using their authorized accounts to scrape Google are likely at most guilty of a TOS violation and Google may choose to cut their accounts, but it's very hard to make a case that the Google API saying, over and over again, "Yes you may view that video" constitutes either unauthorized access or exceeding the bounds of access under 9-48.000.
It's hard to comment on whether Swartz violated the CFAA. Since he wasn't tried, we'll never really know. He exited life before justice could happen one way or the other.