And I presume the Anthropic CEO will be indicted on 13 felony counts under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and for wire fraud. Like Aaron Swartz, right?
Right?
N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...
I've been saying the same thing, Aaron Swartz arguably contributed more meaningful things long before AI, and was basically forced to make one of the worst decisions a person can make (at least in my opinion).
If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:
* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).
* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).
* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.
What happened to him?
He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.
>He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.
He did hack these systems and MIT's network. They had video of him in the MIT wiring closet and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I'm not saying it wasn't pursued aggressively out of political motivations, which seems supported if you dig enough, but the facts of the case were about more than PDFs.
What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?
What if they hide a laptop in a wiring closet and then try to come back for it while covering up their face to hide from a camera inside of it?
What if they run from the police who try to stop them?
In any case, we don't have to have quibble over shades of gray, it's all in the well-documented write ups and court docs. Mens rea is easily established here.
> What if they get blocked from the network and repeatedly change accounts, IPs and then MACs repeatedly to get around progressively escalating blocks from the network admins?
If you think anyone who makes a new account in a videogame for getting an old account banned should be charged with felony hacking, that's certainly a position you can take...
> What if they run from the police who try to stop them?
Running from police officers isn't generally considered hacking.
And ultimately, we'll never know what a court of law would have said because he chose (to the extent that anyone wrestling with the mental illness that is suicidal depression really chooses) to never have his day in court, unfortunately.
mitnick also just logged into shit with default passwords and got ppl to send him source codes and give him access to stuff. by todays 20-stage crazy ass exploits its also not really hacking... these things change over time.
putting morality to the side in favor of legal pragmatism , certain jurisdictions classify the act of accessing data without prior authority as data espionage
If you leave the door to your house unlocked, am I welcome to come in, pop on into your utility closet, plug into a switch port and take everything your machines allow me to fetch?
I don't disagree with what he was doing from a moral standpoint or a hacker standpoint, but it's very easy to convict him.
This discussion typically devolves into an argument about what is "publicly accessible." No reasonable person (i.e. those who serve on juries - not autistic software engineers) would agree that someone who isn't even a student at a school is legally entitled to enter a building (unlocked or not), venture into their utility room and access protected computer resources.
Everyone loves to make this about JSTOR: they weren't the only victim. MIT was far more aggrieved; JSTOR blocking his Harvard account access and him proceeding to breach their TOS ("clickwrap agreements aren't law!!!") and circumvent their defenses isn't required to convict him of CFAA violations.
Why can't I go into a bank, sit down at a personal banker's desk who is away on vacation, plug into a switch port and do whatever I want? There's no lock on his cubicle, the door was open! This is the legal equivalent of "neener neener, I'm not touching you."
Mens rea is an important thing people love to sweep under the rug with this case:
• First and foremost: Why did he have to go to into a closet at MIT to fetch documents? Why not do it at home or a public library?
• Because of rate limits and/or authentication requirements. He *knew* he could not obtain the access he needed through other means, so he had to trespass to do it.
• Why did he cover his face with his bicycle helmet... just when passing by cameras?
• He wasn't some weirdo who liked to wear his helmet that way: he stopped immediately when he believed he didn't need to conceal his identity any further. He *knew* he shouldn't be there.
• He registered his guest account using false credentials: "Gary Host" and "Grace Host" - "Ghost"
• Why wouldn't he just use his real name if he believed what he was doing was legitimate?
• When MIT blocked his IP, he released/renewed and fetched a new one. Fine, no problem on its own, hard to prove intent there. When MIT subsequently blocked his MAC address, he proceeded to change one character and kept on downloading.
• Computer people will try to reduce this to "MAC addresses aren't legal identifiers blah blah blah." The beliefs of zealous third parties are completely irrelevant: direct measures were taken to prevent his access, he recognized and immediately circumvented them. He *knew* what he was doing. That's what matters.
• Why hide his hardware under boxes? In absence of all of the other facts, sure, one could argue that he didn't want students at this ultra-prestigious Ivy League school to steal his shit, but to a reasonable person weighing the totality of the circumstances: he was again concealing his actions because he knew they were wrong.
No one is sweeping mens rea under the carpet. That he knew what he was doing isnt in dispute - its that the punishment didnt fit the crime. If that standard were applied evenly, then the CEOs of certain AI companies would each be facing millennia in prison for the volume of copyright infringement they knowingly and wilfully performed.
If you had them on camera doing it and proof they did it knowingly and willingly, then you could.
Discovery forces evidence to be turned over, but only if it exists and you know about it. Does the evidence exist?
It did in Swartz’s case, unfortunately for him. We don’t excuse an individual just because it’s harder to hold a corporation accountable. States have immense power over corps old and new, btw, it’s a failure of the people to not demand that be exercised, but this whole discussion is a non sequitur already.
> you conceal your actions if you believe others will try to stop you
Which is conveniently exactly what the statute requires to establish criminality: knowingly exceeding authorized access. They have a lawful right to stop you (revoking authorization), you do not have a right to proceed anyway. This is the "wrong" and is accordingly a federal felony.
What annoys me is that when I asked Claude to use code I had already written with selenium to scrape a web page, it refused and told me it wasn't going to get into an arms race with cloudflare. One rule for them and another for us.
> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse).
None of the federal charges really had anything to do with copying the files [1].
> Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
You are comparing the ridiculous DOJ press release number [2] for Swartz to Mitnick's actual sentence. You should compare like to like, so should be comparing 35 years for Swartz to the ridiculous DOJ press release number for Mitnick which was 200 years.
by the way, a year after swartz worked on RSS (so when he was 15) he joined the creative commons foundation and helped create the technical architecture for it. what a guy
> He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
Internally, this was not the case in 2013. u/kn0thing and u/spez were considered the founders, their retired jerseys hung on the wall, and no one ever mentioned Aaron Swartz.
Do you have a citation for the claim that Schwartz was only copying "publicly funded research papers"? My understanding is that he was trying to pull all of JSTOR, which would be copyrighted papers going back to all kinds of funding models from many countries, not just US public-funded research.
Don't get me wrong, as a researcher myself most of us see him (and his successors in piracy) as heroes that make our work a lot easier by making everything so easily accessible, usually even more convenient than our own institutional libraries. But your claim sounds like inaccurate myth-building.
JSTOR is a major repository of twentieth-century humanities publications. When these come from the US, they are usually privately funded research. HN is dominated by a STEM crowd that tends to think only about that scholarship, which is often publicly funded, but in a discussion like this one needs a good familiarity with what JSTOR is and what it contains.
Eh, I assume the humanities are a tiny portion of the funding for academia. Their equipment is what, coloured pencils and expensive tea? Hardly anything compared to a large hadron collider.
I was referring to the comment about private vs public funding. Yes, the only relevant fact is about the morality of hiding knowledge behind exorbitant pay walls. Academics submit papers freely, and sometimes pay for the privilege, peer reviewers work for free, and then the rent seekers charge everybody to read it. It's immoral. I agree.
> He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems.
The Aaron Swartz case is important to know about and has catalyzed some good discussions about CFAA reform, but that specific case is a lot more complicated than your summary.
Before I begin: I agree that the punishment was too significant for the crime. I completely agree on that count. Discussing the facts of the case draws a lot of angry downvotes, so to be clear: I'm not saying he deserved any of these sentences nor that the laws are written well. I'm trying to explain the facts.
The PDFs were open to downloads on the MIT network. Straightforward downloading of the PDFs wouldn't have been a CFAA violation. The case became complicated because he started circumventing restrictions on the downloads. This escalated to breaking into a wiring closet and hiding a laptop in the closed-off infrastructure. Once someone breaks into physical infrastructure to circumvent access restrictions, it gets really hard to argue that they weren't doing a form of unauthorized access.
> He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.
The plea deal (the correct comparison to Kevin Mitnick's case) would have been 6 months, not 35+ years.
One thing to note is that Aaron was, at the time, increasingly working in traditional politics, through his activist group Demand Progress[1] and his work with up-and-coming progressive politicians. I think he had come to the conclusion -- rather presciently -- that working in mainstream politics was the most effective thing he could do. Any criminal sentence would have severely hampered that work. I heard that played on his mind a lot.
There's a what-if story here: one of the people Aaron worked most closely with in this part of his life was a young Ben Wikler[2]. They shared a lot of views about how things should change, and how to change them. Watching Ben's career since then, I can't help but feel that Aaron would have followed a similar path. By 2025, Ben was senior enough in the Democratic Party to be a competitive candidate for Chair of the DNC.
I often wonder whether Carmen Ortiz[3], the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the case, or any of the rest of that generation, realise what they did to the Democratic Party's future chances by unjustly targeting one of its most promising figures.
It's one of the parts of the story that highlights the tragedy of it: Swartz going through the process and out the other side could have bent mainstream politics. His story restonated, and continues to do so, with a technocratic community that itself gained a lot of political sway in the subsequent decades.
> This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.
I'm aware, though I will note, in the case of Kevin Mitnick the crimes were abhorrent, and I am sure Aaron was 100% in the wrong, and I don't think he should have gotten a slap on the wrist, but felonies + prison time for a few publicly funded PDFs is a bit drastic.
To be fair, I'm trying to remember things that happened over a decade ago, I could get some things wrong. I think me and you agree for the most part either way.
> To be fair, I'm trying to remember things that happened over a decade ago, I could get some things wrong.
The reason I know these things is because I remembered it the same way you did up until a few years ago. Then I re-read the case and was surprised at how much it differed from the version that has been repeated everywhere for years.
This is a serious misunderstanding of the Bartz case, which resulted in a $1.5B settlement on the part of Anthropic to authors whose works they pirated from LibGen
even back then, having 1 day in prison can forever impact your employment aspects. Perhaps the rising trend of internet influencer could have gotten around it, but it's less about the sentence and more about the federal government choosing to prosecute a young man over a situation both parties already settled.
Meanwhile, Claude does the same thing and it is deemed "progress" when the federal government profits from it.
Sure, but he also denied that plea deal, so he was definitely looking at possibly 7 years in prison. This corporal treatment or whatever you want to call it, of our legal system is a bit ridiculous... "Take our offer or its worse!"
It basically treats you guilty until proven innocent, which I hate. I know Aaron Swartz very likely did, it was an activist level "hack" but what if someone else "did it" and they threw the book at them, and they took the felonies despite not actually having done it? Lots of people have taken plea deals because its less costly than fighting the law in court.
My assumption is he did not want to plea guilty to a bunch of felonies, I think I read that this was part of it. It's rather extreme to throw that many years at someone like him AND felonies, I don't think he should have gotten a complete slap on the wrist, but what he did was literally web scraping PDFs, the kind that OpenAI and Anthropic do all the time and get away with, only instead of them being some authors IP, they were publicly funded in many, many cases.
In the US you have two types of legal systems, the state and federal level. Within each, you have misdemeanors and felonies. Misdemeanors are the lower level and cover non-serious crimes (vandalism, theft, minor traffic violations), and typically are fines or imprisonment of up to a year. They have no bearing on your rights as an American on either level. Some federal misdemeanors exist (poaching at natural parks or defacing monuments) but most federal crimes are felonies, leaving misdemeanors to the state’s discretion.
Felonies, however, impact your rights as an American. You cannot own firearms, you cannot vote, you cannot hold public office, and you are a “high risk” economically and socially, making loans and employment difficult. State-level non-violent felonies can normally be expunged/sealed over time for otherwise lawful citizens, but federal felonies never go away.
He denied the plea deal because he, as an activist, did not want to suffer losing those rights. The prosecution wouldn’t budge and was adamant in making an example out of him because he was a figure of hacktivism. They also desperately wanted the CFAA (a poorly worded law written by tech illiterates in 1986) to maintain its broad power.
For further context, this was a response to Anonymous and other would-be hacktivists, coming right off the heels of Anonymous’s Arab Spring campaign and the hack of HBGary. The Obama administration targeted Swartz to make an example out of him and scare future hacktivists, coinciding with the arrest of Sabu (the co-founder of LulzSec) and him becoming an informant to round up the current group.
Sure, but almost every state blocks it for the duration of your time in prison, at minimum. A fair portion are longer, and some states make it almost impossible for federal felons to vote.
That’s federal, which has no barriers. It’s left up to the states to decide how state level offices work, and being a convicted felon is a knife in the back of any potential political career. In NY specifically (where Swartz lived) you need a “Certificate of Good Conduct” or else you can’t run, and it would have taken (assuming he got convicted with 7 years as was threatened) 8-13 years for him to be legally able.
The exact specifics don’t even matter for Swartz’s case though, because for him it was more ideological than practical.
Because it's true, and he tried when he wasn't being prosecuted. The point has that some people are unfortunately prone to chronic suicidal episodes. It doesn't make sense to blame some external factor in cases like these.
If he was cut off in traffic and then went home and committed suicide, would you say that the driver that cut him off was responsible for his suicide. You might say that's because no normal person would commit suicide over that act, but no normal person would commit suicide when offered a 6 month house arrest.
And if you were going to commit suicide because of a long prison sentence you would probably do it after you were found guilty, like the guy who drank poison right as he was found guilty of something that would put him in jail for most of the rest of his life
Who were the prosecutors and lawyers involved in the Aaron Swartz case? Where are the pitchforks for them? You can't just hide behind "The Government".
Apparently, at least some of the people involved were Carmen Ortiz and Stephen Heymann. While pitchforks did come, they were in no way punished directly for this case and were allowed to ride off into the sunset at the minor cost of their political careers.
The Aaron Swartz case is not an analog of these claims.
The Anthropic class action was already settled. It's what they mention in the opening of the article. Anthropic got in trouble for downloading the books (pirating) but it was determined to be fair use to use the content for training.
Aaron Swartz was not charged with piracy or downloading PDFs, even though that's how the story has been told. The charges were related to him breaking into a private wiring closet, hiding a laptop, and circumventing access controls on a system.
The Aaron Swartz charges were ridiculous. I'm not disputing that. However, there isn't an equivalent charge in this Anthropic case. Even if you or I get caught downloading pirated PDFs of eBooks from a torrent, the CFAA would not apply.
The main class action suit was already decided. The Stanford professors in this story opted out of the class action and are trying to get higher individual settlements with their own lawyers.
One of the issues a lot of people have is that if Aaron had formed an LLC and hired someone to connect the laptop for him, jailtime would never have been under the table and he wouldn't necessarily be directly liable for any large fines he couldn't pay.
There is a general sentiment that it is wrong for licensed organizations of people to get away with crimes ranging from these to supporting literal child labor, when an unlicensed group or individual faces decades in prison for the same offenses.
And there is another sentiment that Swartz would not have had to do what he did in the first place if copyright and the DMCA hadn't been erected only to be weaponized and discriminately applied,
> if Aaron had formed an LLC and hired someone to connect the laptop for him, jailtime would never have been under the table
Yes, it would. Ortiz was pushing a novel interpretation of the CFAA under which ToS violations constituted criminal access. It has no legal precedent but was in vogue at the time. (After Swartz, it fell completely out of favor.)
Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Why isn't the comparison meaningful? Aaron broke the law and circumvented protections, Anthropic broke the law and circumvented protections. Regardless of if Aaron broke into a network closet or anthropic broke DRM, anthropic took explicit action to receive knowingly stolen goods.
Yes. This isn't even controversial. Aaron broke into a network to obtain papers. The CFAA is applied when someone breaks into a network. Downloading from libgen isn't breaking into a network.
(2) More to the point, it 100% breached the CFAA by securing unauthorised access to a U.S. state government website hosting election-related data, pulling aggregate vote-count statistics from a gated government dashboard. The state government itself confirmed the access was entirely unauthorised.
If a human security researcher had deployed an agent that behaved this way, it would constitute a textbook felony under the CFAA for accessing those systems without authorisation.
Unfortunately different rules apply when you have the power to buy off Congress and the Appeals Courts.
Most recently a US appeals court ruled on 5 August that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on a claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts.
Did he even break into a network? Seems to me he was on the student network he was authorised to be on, he just needed a safe place to hide his laptop with power and networking, so he left it in a server closet, instead of leaving it behind a radiator in the student library.
Criminal law, "beyond a reasonable doubt", doesn't mean "there exists, however implausible, an explanation".
He did break into the network - he was spoofing MAC addresses. You don't have a level of technical sophistication allowing you to do this, and then say "oh, I assumed the server closet with an "Authorized access only" sign, usually locked, seemed like a safe place, that's all, and since I was there, I figured I might as well just plug directly into a network switch in there."
Many judges are not technical. Most judges are not idiots.
What matters is how you got it. Accepting a watch someone freely offers you is different from breaking into a house to steal it, even if the watch you were given turns out to be stolen.
In reference to the laws handling stolen goods; the law holds you accountable if a reasonable person in your exact situation would have suspected the item was stolen.
For example, if the item was derived from a repository of stolen goods that was already illegal in the US on the basis of it being a repository of stolen goods.
Which is why GP should never have attempted the "theft" analogy. No part of what Aaron Swartz did was theft - so every single statute you can cite regarding knowingly receiving stolen property is irrelevant.
The act of theft in my analogy is irrelevant, you can pick theft or any other analogy you like. What matters is that, under the law, there was another unlawful act in that process, one that falls under a different section and constitutes a different crime. That's what makes these cases different. You can agree or disagree with that, but that's how the law works and how it's interpreted.
It seems like you believe it was wrong for Swartz to have been prosecuted. It doesn't seem like it would serve justice to prosecute other people in the same malicious way. Doing the wrong thing now just because a wrong thing happened in the past is not how a just society operates.
The difference here is that you have an individual with no profit motive being hounded by the government, vs a corporation with a profit motive and evidence of a continued pattern being let off with a slap on the wrist. To me that is not a just society.
There is also a "profit motive makes it wrong" idea permeating at least parts of the culture, which is equally suspect. We should apply standards consistently and judge the ethics by the amount of harm that was caused.
It's not equally suspect. Profit seeking behavior, left unchecked, yields problematic outcomes rather quickly. Unmonetized actions don't seem to have this tendency. Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line. Until we can find a way to bias our economic outputs away from things that harm and towards things that help, guilty until proven innocent is the right heuristic for profit seekers.
> Like, nobody volunteers to distribute contaminated food, but people will do so quite readily in service to their bottom line.
Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?
> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color
Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.
It's a thing, it's called food fraud. Happens commonly these days with various spices, which are often cut with metals to increase their weight. Sometimes those metals are heavy metals, which are obviously bad for you.
Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.
But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.
"Guilty until proven innocent" is an authoritarian, quasi-Stalinist view. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with seeking profit, and most people who do so are completely within ethical bounds. For the ones who do unethical things, we have laws and courts to decide that and to punish them appropriately.
It is not profit motive but public choice economics, from which we see that state actors and agencies act in their own interest. The difference is a defenseless individual being bullied by an overly zealous official who thought she had something to gain by beating up a nerd versus an organization picking on someone their own size.
I actually think we should maximally punish people for breaking the law if the law exists. And remove or edit the law if it no longer serves the people. The way we go about this stuff is that we let people break laws until it serves some purpose. Instead we should remove or edit the laws.
Otherwise we're creating a system where it is unfair for some people.
Anthropic has ample resources to fight this law if it is unjust. They should get vigorous, to-the-letter enforcement of the law to stress-test it for people who don't have the same level of resources.
Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.
FWIW, the Aaron Swartz thing happened because an egomaniacal politician thought it would bolster her career. It was a fluke (her office was only involved by coincidence) with disastrous consequences.
We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.
Three prosecutors and MIT leadership were responsible for the charges. Most US Attorney's are scummy attack dogs because their work requires it, so I would blame MIT for wanting to make an example of him instead of handling it like a disciplinary matter and a teachable moment.
No, we should absolutely use it to attack these anti-human technologists. The precedent has been set and we can fight back against these extremely anti-democratic death cults using the tried and true method of state sanctioned lawfare.
No precedent was set. Nothing went to court. To the extent there is precedent it’s in the prosecutor’s career having been ruined by that stain. Using that failed prosecution to attack anyone risks it becoming actual precedent.
Of course precedent has been set, the government is able to litigate civil infractions into full blown felonies if they decide to.
You're thinking of something unrelated.
We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies, with any luck we could put some software devs in federal prison too. Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously.
> Of course precedent has been set, the government is able to litigate civil infractions into full blown felonies
Swartz "was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA)" and wire fraud statute [1]. The CFAA angle specifically rested on a legal theory around escalating terms-of-service violations into felonies. That theory never found precedent because it literally never went to court. As a matter of prosecutorial discretion, it has never been brought up again because it tanked Ortiz's career.
> You're thinking of something unrelated
What do you think I'm thinking of?
> We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies
We can. It would mean reviving that legal theory. If it results in a conviction it becomes real legal precedent. That, in turn, means we get more prosecutions like Aaron Swartz's.
> Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously
Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
Why not go after them directly with taxes and prosecution under non-harebrained schemes?
Aaron Swartz ran so the labs could sprint. Markdown is ginormous. Every answer on Stack Overflow is licensed under Creative Commons 2.0. 20 years of human exchange on Reddit. And finally, the knowledge he decided should be free for all mankind can be sold back to us, through a meter, by the token.
If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.
The distinction (besides Anthropic being too big to be thrown in jail) is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers with intent to redistribute, and was publicly attacking copyright laws.
Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.
Are you saying Aaron Swartz should have just left a similar paper trail documenting that he believed to do the right thing in the interest of society? I don't believe this would have saved him from the wrath of the copyright industry.
the cfaa is extremely broad, but it doesn't cover downloading books from libgen and the like. there is no alleged unauthorized system access (in this case).
Thank you for not forgetting about him. I bring up this insane and tragic persecution and prosecutorial injustice and hypocrisy whenever I can.
I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.
Everyone in this thread arguing the legalese of what Aaron did vs what Anthropic did is missing the damn point.
Yes, the exact crimes are not the same.
Aaron was a vulnerable individual and a very easy target for an overzealous prosecutor. Anthropic is a large company with the money and resources to shield any individual working there from meaningful punishment. No one at anthropic is facing jail time for crimes that should carry a sentence. The crimes are similar and involve theft of copyrighted resources. Aaron’s point with JSTOR is that all that research had already been paid for by American taxpayers. JSTOR was just gatekeeping for profit.
The message from Alsup is clear: if you have money, pay the fine and you can keep doing what you like. If you’re a single person without that, you will be caught and maliciously prosecuted.
Aaron Swartz should not have been prosecuted. Full stop. His case should not (and I am fairly certain will not) be seen as legal precedent for employees at Anthropic. Each time I have read the headline for this story today on HN I clicked below the up arrow wishing that there was a way to downvote stories. Intellectual property bullies are not only aggressively boring, their clamor adds nothing constructive to society: it is purely parasitic and uninteresting discourse.
The law is not some immutable thing, in fact its something that we humans evolve over time on a case by case basis to improve and adjust.
Hence why bringing up a case where justice was not served proportionally presents an opportunity to discuss where potential improvements could be made or errors were committed.
I know it makes people who take comfort in institutions and rules uncomfortable to bring up the fact that none of this is real and all of it is a construct.
But we can in fact improve "the law" and have done so basically since the beginning of time, hence how the current law came to be. In the US specifically, this is literally the basis of how common law works (bottoms up vs. top down).
Thank you for saying this. I am getting tired of current SV speed running culture that actually like the means justify the end. And anyone that says “but ai will save so many lives every day delay is a genocide” spare me, you can’t prove that is true and you don’t get to violate established moral and legal principles in service of some vague and impossible to quantify future utopia.
And to be clear, Aaron should not have been charged under the circumstances.
Why the downvote? Anthropic and OpenAI leadership are thieves and profiting off things they don’t own.
Aaron was doing it for the betterment of humanity, there wasn’t a profit motive involved there.
In casual conversation in America English, it a derogaty term used to mean "poor and lacking in quality of life, freedom, and/or democratic governance."
> “To put me to work that way, without remittance, is a form of slave labor,” said Wolff, professor emeritus of English and winner of the National Medal of Arts. “They’re using my work without paying for it. As time goes on, they’re going to make the lives of writers very difficult if there’s no fruit to their labor.”
This is obviously hyperbolic, but it was a very poor choice of words.
It also relies on an assumption - that AI will become a substitute for buying books - that I think is likely untrue. You’ve been able to easily gain a surface-level understanding of anything for free online for decades, and for that matter, you’ve been able to easily pirate any book for decades! Hasn’t stopped people from buying books, or going to college, or doing any number of other expensive things that are technically unnecessary if the goal is just to gain information.
While I also agree that AI will probably not replace books, I think we can't deny that the AI companies are positioning AI as being able to replace books. Part of what makes pirating pirating is that you're trying to siphon the original revenue stream for yourself. Whether or not you're successful is one thing, but I do think that is Anthropic's intention.
They didn't, like, steal the books for ideological reasons or anything. They stole the books so they could then generate equivalents, so people will pay them instead of buy the original books. That's the entire value proposition of AI.
In my view, slavery is more about freedom than work
It's sad to know that all of my creative work will be used to train future models whether I like it or not. Even if I release my work via physical media only, we've already seen Anthropic use their immense resources to obtain offline media to train their models. It feels like, as an artist, my work can never be kept from falling into the hands of AI companies.
I can empathise with his statement more easily when I think about it in those terms.
Franz Kafka told his friends, in no uncertain terms, that upon his death, his unfinished works should be burnt. This included The Trial and The Castle.
We never had the right to tell the future what to do. That was never part of the deal. We barely have the right to tell other people what to do with the ideas we breathe into the world, and that right was only carved into the US Constitution (and English common law before it) because it was believed that it heavily incentivized creating more ideas.
In the era where information flows as freely as it does... I'm not even sure that incentive works the way it was intended to anymore.
When I'm thinking about this, I usually flip the script: why should Disney have the right to tell everyone what they're allowed to do and not do with a picture and audio of a cartoon mouse for a person's actual entire life?
That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.
Not talking about that professor in particulier, but it seems like there is a significant amount of "slave labor" happening in academia, by professors, that goes further than simple copyright infringement.
I am talking about professors taking the work of their students as their own, unpaid of course, and the students can't say much because their future depends on it. So before calling simple copyright infringement "slave labor", they should look at their own community. At least the professors whose work is illegally copied are not forced to do it by the ones taking it.
Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.
I don’t think that’s true, words just tend to diminish in strength over time towards a muddy middle. Look at how basically anything gets labeled “fascist” these days.
For an older example consider “awesome” (literally: inspiring awe)
It was Carlyle who, in his seminal Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question, argued that slavery is a fundamental human relationship, and as such you can't ban slavery, but can only ban the word.
Whether it was through serfdom, indentured servitute, state labor obligations, patriarchal labor obligations, or outright slavery - coerced human labor was a constant norm.
In Britain, quitting a job was criminal until 1875!
The idea that work is done almost exclusively through voluntary labor is a modern (post-WW2) reality, and even then mostly exclusive to Western, capitalist nations. Even in modern, non-capitalist society (Soviet Union, Maoist China) work was largely obligatory and assigned to you.
Of course, Marx would point out that all labor is obligatory if you need to work to eat. But I think he would even take for granted the ability for everyone to accept or reject what specific work they wanted to do.
Well, given that copyright infringement doesn't require any labor on the part of the person who created the work, it seems to be an inappropriate use of the phrase in this case.
One of the interesting things about copyright infringement is that if you weren't told it was happening, you'd never know.
Actually it's even worse than that. If you have to work for money, instead of money working for you, then you're money's slave.
Buying back your freedom has a specific price tag, in our economy. (Most people don't do the math though, because it is unpleasant. I would recommend doing the math.)
It's marked as an informal disapproving use, so it depends on whether you want to convey this message or not. But Yes, a juror could say "What we had to do was slave labor, we didn't even get proper breaks" and you would perfectly well understand what they said and meant with that message.
McDonald's workers are certainly closer to being slaves than any professor at Stanford. That's one reason California established a minimum $20/hr for foodservice work. Even when the work is largely a matter of tending machines rather than the application of hard-won culinary skills, it's still hot, dangerous, dirty, and demanding.
> Slavery is not being poorly compensated or coerced into work.
It kind of is though :/
Like I get what you're saying, minimum wage workers have an autonomy that slaves would not have. But in practice that autonomy is often not meaningful in any real way.
I don't know. I just think that "You're a hair above being a slave so it doesn't count as slavery" is probably not a hill worth dying on
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe an entry level aid in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus and genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job? Or would you argue there is no one poorly remunerated?
Jane Doe making $14/hr at McDonald’s is absolutely a wage slave. It is different than historical chattel slavery, but no less slavery, albeit dressed up to look less offensive on the surface.
It is a different type of slavery, just as historically there were lots of variations of slavery, with differing levels of what a slave could do. Do you know what wage slaves are allowed to do? Work for a wage (AKA sell their time and/or bodies), or die. Sure seems like slavery to me.
>It’s not and it’s absolutely ahistoric to make this claim. (Not disputing that
it’s a popular view in some circles.)
So, there has only ever been one type of slavery, and all slaves had the exact same set of restrictions? Yeah, nah, not with you on that.
And just because a wage slave can switch from McDonalds to Taco Bell, does not make them any less slaves.
You seem very tied to a very specific conception of slavery that only matches African-American slaves in the US. There is far more to it; it's about freedom. And if you think being poor your whole life, being allowed to switch fast food joints, never getting ahead and never having a chance to get ahead, never having any land because it's all already owned, that all that is freedom, well, you clearly have a different conception of freedom than I do, and I would never want to be subjected to yours.
Capitalism is really good at convincing people that this is the only way things can be, and freedom is the ability to sell your body and time. I reject that completely.
> seem very tied to a very specific conception of slavery that only matches African-American slaves in the US
I'm anchoring to that for discussions happening regarding conduct in America, yes. If minimum-wage jobs are literally slavery, then slavery–to a lot of Americans–isn't that bad, and slavery for Americans will by default mean slavery within the America context, i.e. chattel slavery.
That said, slavery has real definitions and tests, and words like subject and serf exist because people have been debating and defining these terms for millennia, regardless of Reddit or NewsMax's redefinition of these terms.
> that all that is freedom
Nobody argued this either.
> Capitalism is really good at convincing people that this is the only way things can be
Another straw man. We can raise the minimum wage and establish social guarantees without trivializing slavery.
FWIW he's primarily known as a writer of fiction and memoir, not as a professor. Interestingly, half of the other professors named are fiction writers.
Distinction without a difference. They pirated books for the purpose of using them to train their models.
The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.
I think it's a significant distinction. The original title implies that the training was illegal when the court actually found that the training was fair use. It implies that Anthropic was required to ask the professors for permission to train on their books.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
How does it open the door to that? That's literally the argument that was rejected by saying the fair use defense only counts for the legally-acquired media.
> “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,”
That's my mistake.
I went back and read the actual opinion, and while I'm disappointed that training an LLM is fair-use transformative, I'm hopeful about a trial on the subject of the pirated copies. But I'm also worried that the argument seems like it might succeed if such training is "one-shot" without the central library or repository of intermediate copies. And that doesn't seem like a good outcome. But maybe my pessimism here is also misplaced.
> “The essential problem … is what economists call ‘transaction costs,’” Goldstein wrote in an email to The Daily. “Millions of individual copyrighted works may be copied in the course of any training incident, and it’s simply impracticable for the platform to obtain licenses from the copyright owner of every — or, indeed, any — single work.”
Seems strange. The question should be whether you legally have to do so or not. If you do whether it is impractical or not is not a reason to break the law. Perhaps it makes your business not feasible but so be it. If you ran a clothing store that required you steal from other brands and remix it for your customers, you couldn't say "it's impractical for me to get permission", no?
If this argument is extrapolated, why should streaming services get the rights to copyrighted works? It sounds like a lot of work.
Hell, why would Pirate Bay be any different than Anthropic in this case? Millions of pieces of copyrighted work, being used as intake rather than sold.
Pirate Bay didn't even host content, they merely acted as a tracker for others participating in the actual file sharing. No doubt, Anthropic and the rest are sitting upon petabytes of illegally acquired media.
Yeah, that's exactly my though every time this argument is brought up. "Obviously this endeavor is not economically viable if I had to follow the rules, so I get to skip that part" is such an astounding line of reasoning.
Neural network is a method of compression. Lossy compression. What the AI companies want to push constantly is misconception:
This is not algorithm
And
They think
They are juggling between a personification and de-personification of their models according to what they need at the moment. So when you're hacking using fable, fable says you hacked.
When anthropic wants to gain money they say "our model hacked and we do not know why (damn it's so good)"
When using publications, "they have been used for learning" (not algorithmic compression)
I've pirated several books, movies, games, and music albums because there was literally no way to give someone my money for them. I can't imagine trying to acquire things legitimately, at scale.
This is such an amazing take... if "training" an LLM with a book is fine, if you rewrite the book with slightly different wording... are you plagiarizing it? if you are then every application of AI over trained data of that trained data is plagiarizing?
Say you have this Math book and you rewrite it from third to first person and then replace all the sine examples with cosine and modify the exercises to have different numbers... is it stealing? you can buy 1 book, "train on it" and then generate your "personal original approved copy"
To preface, AI is a complex matter that I don’t know well enough to claim a net positive or negative.
But I do not think anyone using technology can say they have not seen “any benefit”. While it may be a small benefit for many, it is a useful tool that has contributed to a significant amount of code and information retrieval.
You could say “the downsides vastly outweigh the upsides” or “the societal impact causes suffering”. But to say there is 0 benefit seems like a lie.
If you have ever used an LLM chat bot to gather information and it was correct. If you have ever used a program that was written in part or full by an LLM. If you have read an article that used an LLM to find sources. If you have had an interesting discussion about the ethics of LLMs. All of these are a benefit, no matter how small.
That is an excellent way of looking at things - if a distillation attack against a model is bad, so should be a distillation attack against mankind. I'd argue that this suggests the former should be legal, rather than the latter becoming illegal.
Exactly. Either information flows freely, or everyone pays every bit of it. It’s clear which one is more beneficial to society. Barring distillation is an extraction of social wealth.
In a just world they would have to pull all models, for which this is the case, have auditors walking in left and right, supervising their training of the next version, to make sure they only train on material, that they are allowed to train on, and meticulously have them document every little corpus of data they use and its sources.
In reality we won't see this behavior stop, until Anthropic is hit with a huge penalty sledgehammer that threatens its existence. This is a gold rush and without real consequences, nothing will change.
> “To put me to work that way, without remittance, is a form of slave labor,” said Wolff, professor emeritus of English and winner of the National Medal of Arts.
Are the late authors of Project Gutenberg also enslaved?
Title is misleading. The ruling said training on books is fair use. What got them in trouble was grabbing the books from LibGen instead of just buying them, which is a pretty dumb way to lose $1.5B. If I torrented half a million books I'd be getting a lot more than a $3k-per-book settlement.
We went through this with Google. Scanning books is legal as long as you then immediately destroy them. Then since training with material you own is fair use they’re good to go.
Like when people bring this up as if it's somehow just like acceptable.
It's not at all. That's utter bullshit. The people that run the courts have been bought out. They have no idea what the far-reaching consequences of this is.
I'm willing to bet the vast majority of students and professors at Stanford have consulted an "illegally obtained" textbook at some point. Either directly from Anna or second hand.
Here's my understanding, someone correct me if I'm wrong:
- Anthropic et al basically grabbed whatever content they could to scan and train the model.
- The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.
- They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.
- Whether this a fair or illegal use of copyrighted text already seems like an adorably obsolete question. Regardless, the damage is basically done - they can neither prove one way or another how much any single text influenced their model and they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over.
- Rather than get stuck in court for decades splitting the hairs about copyright law, they wrote massive checks to the publishing industry and agreed to a bunch of restrictions around copyrights.
- For the foreseeable future, every independent copyright holder now has grounds to take grievances to Anthropic and get some form of compensation.
The last court case, mentioned in the article, found Anthropic guilty of pirating eBooks. That's where the penalty came from.
The court ruled that it was fair to train on books, but they had to acquire them legally. That's why these companies buy physical books and scan them now.
The Stanford professors in this article opted out of that last case and are trying to get higher payouts.
Nope. The $1.5 billion settlement had nothing to do with whether LLM training is fair use.
It was how they got the books for training: they torrented collections of pirated ebooks. There are Slack messages from executives describing the process as "blatant violation of copyright." They were stealing books and they knew it.
They didn't start buying books legally and scanning them until much later.
> they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over
I would bet they do have copies on their hard-drives (which would probably be legal for them to possess for their own use, if the originals were obtained legally), and that they could simply omit them from their next training run that they probably do at major updates anyway.
The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.
No, the lawsuit was because they illegally acquired the books (e.g. downloading them from piracy websites)
These days they are sticking to more legal means like the one you described
> They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.
I understand exactly what you mean by this, and you are wrong. If they did not copy them, it would not be possible to extricate copyrighted works out of the model like Harry Potter. You can argue against the copyright system, but don't pretend that what they've done is essentially an advanced form of copying. The data is in the weights.
Of course they did, same with almost every other bit of training material that isn't synthetic (and still indirectly created with illegally obtained training data)
They were already eligible for damages as per the class-action settlement, but several Stanford professors actively opted out of the blanket class-action settlement to pursue Anthropic individually for higher damages.
The title change from "illegally trained" to "illegally obtained" implies that training on illegally obtained books is legal. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the case. Surely Anthropic has a legal team that signed off on it.
If a permanent injunction is granted in the Wolff case, does that mean Anthropic would have to re-train all of their available models, but explicitly exclude those books from the dataset?
There's a certain element of irony to all of this, what, with it being Stanford, the home of "forgiveness is easier to get than permission" and anti-regulation sentiment in the tech industry.
They should get Opus or one of the latest models to be the morality judge of what goes into training.
I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in.
Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.
It would be funny to ask the profs if they are allowed, by law, to read 3 textbooks on a subject and then write a 4th themselves.
After a 1.5 billion settlement, the professor/authors are saying it's not enough.
The judge had an interesting summary of AI:
"He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."
Does copyright over knowledge-based works really have any legitimate position in today's society? We're entering a new age of how information is created, used, and distributed.
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Legitimate as in value-preserving or economically? Probably not. Legitimate as in protecting human authors and artists? I think yeah.
We can argue about whether AI is a net-good for society and if the ends justify the means, but I think it's clear that a lot of people who worked very hard are getting fucked over. Is that okay? Are we really fine with piloting the idea "if you're rich enough you can do anything"?
Because, the reality is that if you or I did this, as many have done before, we would be getting sued to oblivion. Assuming we don't straight-up go to jail. But then AI superscalers do the same thing, on the order of 10,000, and somehow nobody goes to jail. Is that really the kind of message we want to send?
We've entered many new ages of how information is created, used, and distributed over the last 250 years. There's nothing special enough about this new era which justifies throwing out the old ideas of moral and economic rights of an author.
You're the one that brought morality into the conversation. If you don't think there's anything unique about what we've experienced in the last few years, I don't know what to tell you.
They probably did it on purpose so that the professors would sue Anthropic later and make a lot of money.
How about all the copyright MIT licensed open source software? When does it become discovered that they were scraped for training without authorization and without giving attribution?
Good! Information wants to be free, not locked up in some ivory tower. This is a great time upon us, when academics and ivy league elites can no longer gate keep knowledge and hoard it for their ego. Knowledge should benefit humanity as broadly as possible, not just the rich and their academic ilk.
This. It's funny how supposed hackers and freethinkers, most of whom likely pirated something multiple times in their lives, suddenly support copyright.
I always supported copyright. Your accusation of hypocrisy is misplaced, or at the very least not precise enough because you're not aiming it at a specific person.
Why couldn’t they pay for the book to get that knowledge then?
Or do you believe, all books should be free, authors shouldn’t be compensated ever? Why should we compensate programmers or any knowledge worker than if the fruits of their labor should thusly be freely distributed?
It's not the information itself that get sold, but the specific composition of information arranged as a book. Work went into it and people who do it sell that rightfully.
Haha. I appreciate the intent behind this. HN will hate and downvote it of course, but we need constant reminders that we are emotional, take sides just like everyone else, and selectively get outraged about things.
The rules are for everyone but some people also get special treatment b/c they know someone like Trump. Musk donated hundreds of millions of dollars to his presidential campaign to get special treatment for his businesses.
“To put me to work that way, without remittance, is a form of slave labor,” said Wolff, professor emeritus of English and winner of the National Medal of Arts.
Wow. Said without a hint of irony, somehow!
Yet again, Anthropic is the good guys. Though I think this is just the same story from a while ago but told through a Stanford lens, AFAICT?
It's a book. It's meant for the masses to consume and read. And so a computer read it and add it to it's intelligence that everyone else can access. What's the big deal?
I don't think there is such a thing as copyright, patent or intellectual property rights in the AI world. What is the point of one human making another human pay to access the works of another human? There is no point but just accumulating wealth and superiority. Are we really going to sit here and ignore that maybe the professors had privileged lives and their parents or their ancestors enriched themselves on the backs of poor people.
Either way, whatever the arguments, democratize this knowledge. It sure as hell beats paying $300 for a textbook and requiring that for 1500 students every year. Give it all to the people. All of it. Let the people train open weight and smaller models that even more people can access. I'm all for this.
This violates the RICO statute; the entire organization was aware of and relied on the widespread and organized violation of copyright laws as the basis of their entire business. It is a criminal organization, should be seized, and everyone in the chain of command that was aware of or executed on this plan should be tried criminally.
I do not think training an AI model is Fair Use, because LLM "training" is being used as a metaphor for building a matrix with a computer. Only people and animals train and learn; computers run statistical problems over input, which in this case was illegal input acquired by humans.
But it does not matter whether training LLMs is Fair Use, "Fair Use" is a strange and arbitrary legal term that can be expanded to include AI if we wish. This was organized crime whether or not LLM training on copyrighted materials is fair use. It was organized crime whether or not they planned to use them for AI at all.
AI is irrelevant. They could have trained it on GPL'd or MIT code (as long as they then distributed according to the terms of the licenses), and works in the public domain. They could have gotten what they were doing explicitly declared to be fair use by the Library of Congress, and then purchased the materials, like they are belatedly doing now. It wasn't necessary to violate copyright law to prove the technology. They could have proved the technology, then asked for copyright law to be clarified, and licensed huge volumes of works from the very few publishers we have left. Becoming a criminal organization was an explicit choice they made, and they discussed its illegality, and even the risk that it would be discussed on HN, which might inspire prosecution.
The reason they are not being prosecuted is because the rich are beyond the law; prosecutors will not prosecute them. The RICO statute is clear, and explicitly mentions copyright violation.
We can sentence the executives harshly, but go easy on the lower level people, because they are intelligent and valuable to advance the technology. The executives aren't necessary for anything. They're currently running finance scams that are extremely dangerous for the economy. They belong in prison to protect the public.
This is an option that people (real people, with names) have, and are not taking. When they say that they care about law and order, and are worried about the behavior of these companies, they are lying. Trump could literally nationalize them for what they've done. They're vulnerable to any state's attorney who has any author in their state whose book was downloaded. Libgen/Annas-archive would have been the most important honeypot in history.
Right?
N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...
If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:
* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).
* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).
* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.
What happened to him?
He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.
He did hack these systems and MIT's network. They had video of him in the MIT wiring closet and a mountain of circumstantial evidence. I'm not saying it wasn't pursued aggressively out of political motivations, which seems supported if you dig enough, but the facts of the case were about more than PDFs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
If it was, impersonating home users en masse to scrape the whole web to train models would result in lifetime in prison. Now we call it fair use.
What if they hide a laptop in a wiring closet and then try to come back for it while covering up their face to hide from a camera inside of it?
What if they run from the police who try to stop them?
In any case, we don't have to have quibble over shades of gray, it's all in the well-documented write ups and court docs. Mens rea is easily established here.
If you think anyone who makes a new account in a videogame for getting an old account banned should be charged with felony hacking, that's certainly a position you can take...
> What if they run from the police who try to stop them?
Running from police officers isn't generally considered hacking.
I don't disagree with what he was doing from a moral standpoint or a hacker standpoint, but it's very easy to convict him.
This discussion typically devolves into an argument about what is "publicly accessible." No reasonable person (i.e. those who serve on juries - not autistic software engineers) would agree that someone who isn't even a student at a school is legally entitled to enter a building (unlocked or not), venture into their utility room and access protected computer resources.
Everyone loves to make this about JSTOR: they weren't the only victim. MIT was far more aggrieved; JSTOR blocking his Harvard account access and him proceeding to breach their TOS ("clickwrap agreements aren't law!!!") and circumvent their defenses isn't required to convict him of CFAA violations.
Why can't I go into a bank, sit down at a personal banker's desk who is away on vacation, plug into a switch port and do whatever I want? There's no lock on his cubicle, the door was open! This is the legal equivalent of "neener neener, I'm not touching you."
Mens rea is an important thing people love to sweep under the rug with this case:
• First and foremost: Why did he have to go to into a closet at MIT to fetch documents? Why not do it at home or a public library?
• Why did he cover his face with his bicycle helmet... just when passing by cameras? • He registered his guest account using false credentials: "Gary Host" and "Grace Host" - "Ghost" • When MIT blocked his IP, he released/renewed and fetched a new one. Fine, no problem on its own, hard to prove intent there. When MIT subsequently blocked his MAC address, he proceeded to change one character and kept on downloading. • Why hide his hardware under boxes? In absence of all of the other facts, sure, one could argue that he didn't want students at this ultra-prestigious Ivy League school to steal his shit, but to a reasonable person weighing the totality of the circumstances: he was again concealing his actions because he knew they were wrong.Discovery forces evidence to be turned over, but only if it exists and you know about it. Does the evidence exist?
It did in Swartz’s case, unfortunately for him. We don’t excuse an individual just because it’s harder to hold a corporation accountable. States have immense power over corps old and new, btw, it’s a failure of the people to not demand that be exercised, but this whole discussion is a non sequitur already.
No, you conceal your actions if you believe others will try to stop you. It has nothing to do with right or wrong.
Which is conveniently exactly what the statute requires to establish criminality: knowingly exceeding authorized access. They have a lawful right to stop you (revoking authorization), you do not have a right to proceed anyway. This is the "wrong" and is accordingly a federal felony.
None of the federal charges really had anything to do with copying the files [1].
> Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
You are comparing the ridiculous DOJ press release number [2] for Swartz to Mitnick's actual sentence. You should compare like to like, so should be comparing 35 years for Swartz to the ridiculous DOJ press release number for Mitnick which was 200 years.
[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
Internally, this was not the case in 2013. u/kn0thing and u/spez were considered the founders, their retired jerseys hung on the wall, and no one ever mentioned Aaron Swartz.
Don't get me wrong, as a researcher myself most of us see him (and his successors in piracy) as heroes that make our work a lot easier by making everything so easily accessible, usually even more convenient than our own institutional libraries. But your claim sounds like inaccurate myth-building.
A lot (but yes, not all) of that research is publicly funded and then locked away behind corporate paywalls.
The Aaron Swartz case is important to know about and has catalyzed some good discussions about CFAA reform, but that specific case is a lot more complicated than your summary.
Before I begin: I agree that the punishment was too significant for the crime. I completely agree on that count. Discussing the facts of the case draws a lot of angry downvotes, so to be clear: I'm not saying he deserved any of these sentences nor that the laws are written well. I'm trying to explain the facts.
The PDFs were open to downloads on the MIT network. Straightforward downloading of the PDFs wouldn't have been a CFAA violation. The case became complicated because he started circumventing restrictions on the downloads. This escalated to breaking into a wiring closet and hiding a laptop in the closed-off infrastructure. Once someone breaks into physical infrastructure to circumvent access restrictions, it gets really hard to argue that they weren't doing a form of unauthorized access.
> He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
This is another part of the story that gets confused. Kevin Mitnick took a 5 year plea deal. The Swartz case plea deal was 6 months. The maximum sentencing numbers are repeated because they're shocking, but maximum sentencing was never on the table due to the low severity.
The plea deal (the correct comparison to Kevin Mitnick's case) would have been 6 months, not 35+ years.
There's a what-if story here: one of the people Aaron worked most closely with in this part of his life was a young Ben Wikler[2]. They shared a lot of views about how things should change, and how to change them. Watching Ben's career since then, I can't help but feel that Aaron would have followed a similar path. By 2025, Ben was senior enough in the Democratic Party to be a competitive candidate for Chair of the DNC.
I often wonder whether Carmen Ortiz[3], the U.S. Attorney whose office prosecuted the case, or any of the rest of that generation, realise what they did to the Democratic Party's future chances by unjustly targeting one of its most promising figures.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Wikler
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
If only he continued the work, he would be POTUS someday.
Sadly, we'll never know.
I'm aware, though I will note, in the case of Kevin Mitnick the crimes were abhorrent, and I am sure Aaron was 100% in the wrong, and I don't think he should have gotten a slap on the wrist, but felonies + prison time for a few publicly funded PDFs is a bit drastic.
To be fair, I'm trying to remember things that happened over a decade ago, I could get some things wrong. I think me and you agree for the most part either way.
The reason I know these things is because I remembered it the same way you did up until a few years ago. Then I re-read the case and was surprised at how much it differed from the version that has been repeated everywhere for years.
It was 4.8 million PDFs, which I think is a bit more than "a few".
ffs
Meanwhile, Claude does the same thing and it is deemed "progress" when the federal government profits from it.
It basically treats you guilty until proven innocent, which I hate. I know Aaron Swartz very likely did, it was an activist level "hack" but what if someone else "did it" and they threw the book at them, and they took the felonies despite not actually having done it? Lots of people have taken plea deals because its less costly than fighting the law in court.
Felonies, however, impact your rights as an American. You cannot own firearms, you cannot vote, you cannot hold public office, and you are a “high risk” economically and socially, making loans and employment difficult. State-level non-violent felonies can normally be expunged/sealed over time for otherwise lawful citizens, but federal felonies never go away.
He denied the plea deal because he, as an activist, did not want to suffer losing those rights. The prosecution wouldn’t budge and was adamant in making an example out of him because he was a figure of hacktivism. They also desperately wanted the CFAA (a poorly worded law written by tech illiterates in 1986) to maintain its broad power.
For further context, this was a response to Anonymous and other would-be hacktivists, coming right off the heels of Anonymous’s Arab Spring campaign and the hack of HBGary. The Obama administration targeted Swartz to make an example out of him and scare future hacktivists, coinciding with the arrest of Sabu (the co-founder of LulzSec) and him becoming an informant to round up the current group.
This is left up to the states.
> you cannot hold public office
Our current president is a convicted felon.
Sure, but almost every state blocks it for the duration of your time in prison, at minimum. A fair portion are longer, and some states make it almost impossible for federal felons to vote.
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/can-...
> Our current president is a convicted felon.
That’s federal, which has no barriers. It’s left up to the states to decide how state level offices work, and being a convicted felon is a knife in the back of any potential political career. In NY specifically (where Swartz lived) you need a “Certificate of Good Conduct” or else you can’t run, and it would have taken (assuming he got convicted with 7 years as was threatened) 8-13 years for him to be legally able.
The exact specifics don’t even matter for Swartz’s case though, because for him it was more ideological than practical.
If he was cut off in traffic and then went home and committed suicide, would you say that the driver that cut him off was responsible for his suicide. You might say that's because no normal person would commit suicide over that act, but no normal person would commit suicide when offered a 6 month house arrest.
And if you were going to commit suicide because of a long prison sentence you would probably do it after you were found guilty, like the guy who drank poison right as he was found guilty of something that would put him in jail for most of the rest of his life
The Anthropic class action was already settled. It's what they mention in the opening of the article. Anthropic got in trouble for downloading the books (pirating) but it was determined to be fair use to use the content for training.
Aaron Swartz was not charged with piracy or downloading PDFs, even though that's how the story has been told. The charges were related to him breaking into a private wiring closet, hiding a laptop, and circumventing access controls on a system.
The Aaron Swartz charges were ridiculous. I'm not disputing that. However, there isn't an equivalent charge in this Anthropic case. Even if you or I get caught downloading pirated PDFs of eBooks from a torrent, the CFAA would not apply.
The main class action suit was already decided. The Stanford professors in this story opted out of the class action and are trying to get higher individual settlements with their own lawyers.
Indeed: the prosecution of Aaron Swartz drove him to suicide, while Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei is still alive.
There is a general sentiment that it is wrong for licensed organizations of people to get away with crimes ranging from these to supporting literal child labor, when an unlicensed group or individual faces decades in prison for the same offenses.
And there is another sentiment that Swartz would not have had to do what he did in the first place if copyright and the DMCA hadn't been erected only to be weaponized and discriminately applied,
Yes, it would. Ortiz was pushing a novel interpretation of the CFAA under which ToS violations constituted criminal access. It has no legal precedent but was in vogue at the time. (After Swartz, it fell completely out of favor.)
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Say you have a network. You want to keep someone out of it. The tool for that is the CFAA.
If you have a book, and you want to stop someone from reproducing it, the tool for that is copyright.
They cover different domains. If you're not breaking into a network, you're unlikely to be charged under the CFAA.
(1) They admitted its Claude models had breached the systems of three companies since April; including Huggingface.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-30/anthropic...
(2) More to the point, it 100% breached the CFAA by securing unauthorised access to a U.S. state government website hosting election-related data, pulling aggregate vote-count statistics from a gated government dashboard. The state government itself confirmed the access was entirely unauthorised.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4657023-anthropics-claude-bypa...
If a human security researcher had deployed an agent that behaved this way, it would constitute a textbook felony under the CFAA for accessing those systems without authorisation.
Unfortunately different rules apply when you have the power to buy off Congress and the Appeals Courts.
Most recently a US appeals court ruled on 5 August that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on a claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts.
https://www.rte.ie/news/technology/2026/0807/1586941-artific...
RIP Aaron Swartz.
Criminal law, "beyond a reasonable doubt", doesn't mean "there exists, however implausible, an explanation".
He did break into the network - he was spoofing MAC addresses. You don't have a level of technical sophistication allowing you to do this, and then say "oh, I assumed the server closet with an "Authorized access only" sign, usually locked, seemed like a safe place, that's all, and since I was there, I figured I might as well just plug directly into a network switch in there."
Many judges are not technical. Most judges are not idiots.
For example, if the item was derived from a repository of stolen goods that was already illegal in the US on the basis of it being a repository of stolen goods.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-m...
Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?
A quote from that page:
> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.
Maybe the cinnamon case was an isolated incident, but the use of lead compounds to change a food's color is a trend. Per https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5119336/cinnamon-lead-f...
> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color
Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.
Historically this happened to basically all food. Meat was sold rotten, meat was pumped with water for volume, people lied about what meat they were selling, meat was glued together with other meat to create reconstituted cuts that were sold as whole, and on and on. We had exposes, The Jungle, and now that basically doesn't exist because of the FDA.
But, in countries without an FDA equivalent, you can imagine that food fraud runs wild. It ran wild in the US, too, and I think it's fair to say that the only thing limiting it isn't morals, it's the FDA and regulatory framework we've built.
Otherwise we're creating a system where it is unfair for some people.
Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.
We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.
No precedent was set. Nothing went to court. To the extent there is precedent it’s in the prosecutor’s career having been ruined by that stain. Using that failed prosecution to attack anyone risks it becoming actual precedent.
You're thinking of something unrelated.
We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies, with any luck we could put some software devs in federal prison too. Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously.
Swartz "was prosecuted for multiple violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 (CFAA)" and wire fraud statute [1]. The CFAA angle specifically rested on a legal theory around escalating terms-of-service violations into felonies. That theory never found precedent because it literally never went to court. As a matter of prosecutorial discretion, it has never been brought up again because it tanked Ortiz's career.
> You're thinking of something unrelated
What do you think I'm thinking of?
> We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies
We can. It would mean reviving that legal theory. If it results in a conviction it becomes real legal precedent. That, in turn, means we get more prosecutions like Aaron Swartz's.
> Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously
Cutting off the nose to spite the face.
Why not go after them directly with taxes and prosecution under non-harebrained schemes?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.
Anthropic training their model outside of public sight without intent to redistribute, and had a large paper trail that expressed they believed they were acting within fair use.
And, you know, all of the intentional, physical, artfully-planned means by which he did so.
A case which never went to trial and tanked the prosecutor’s career resulting in no more prosecutions of its kind to date.
Let’s not hanker for a return to that.
I don't understand how people have just moved past all these various obvious flaws in the foundations of our society. It's like finding a bug and saying "we don't need to patch it" and then building on top of it, all while knowing it exists. We all know that something is fundamentally wrong.
... and the course of action of Carmen Ortiz', the responsible Attorney General, drove Aaron Swartz into suicide.
Yes, the exact crimes are not the same.
Aaron was a vulnerable individual and a very easy target for an overzealous prosecutor. Anthropic is a large company with the money and resources to shield any individual working there from meaningful punishment. No one at anthropic is facing jail time for crimes that should carry a sentence. The crimes are similar and involve theft of copyrighted resources. Aaron’s point with JSTOR is that all that research had already been paid for by American taxpayers. JSTOR was just gatekeeping for profit.
The message from Alsup is clear: if you have money, pay the fine and you can keep doing what you like. If you’re a single person without that, you will be caught and maliciously prosecuted.
What is the law besides "bizarre overlapping and bureaucratic rule making"? You can't charge people on vibes like "underlying values and beliefs"
Hence why bringing up a case where justice was not served proportionally presents an opportunity to discuss where potential improvements could be made or errors were committed.
I know it makes people who take comfort in institutions and rules uncomfortable to bring up the fact that none of this is real and all of it is a construct.
But we can in fact improve "the law" and have done so basically since the beginning of time, hence how the current law came to be. In the US specifically, this is literally the basis of how common law works (bottoms up vs. top down).
And to be clear, Aaron should not have been charged under the circumstances.
But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.
In casual conversation in America English, it a derogaty term used to mean "poor and lacking in quality of life, freedom, and/or democratic governance."
This is obviously hyperbolic, but it was a very poor choice of words.
It also relies on an assumption - that AI will become a substitute for buying books - that I think is likely untrue. You’ve been able to easily gain a surface-level understanding of anything for free online for decades, and for that matter, you’ve been able to easily pirate any book for decades! Hasn’t stopped people from buying books, or going to college, or doing any number of other expensive things that are technically unnecessary if the goal is just to gain information.
They didn't, like, steal the books for ideological reasons or anything. They stole the books so they could then generate equivalents, so people will pay them instead of buy the original books. That's the entire value proposition of AI.
It's sad to know that all of my creative work will be used to train future models whether I like it or not. Even if I release my work via physical media only, we've already seen Anthropic use their immense resources to obtain offline media to train their models. It feels like, as an artist, my work can never be kept from falling into the hands of AI companies.
I can empathise with his statement more easily when I think about it in those terms.
We never had the right to tell the future what to do. That was never part of the deal. We barely have the right to tell other people what to do with the ideas we breathe into the world, and that right was only carved into the US Constitution (and English common law before it) because it was believed that it heavily incentivized creating more ideas.
In the era where information flows as freely as it does... I'm not even sure that incentive works the way it was intended to anymore.
When I'm thinking about this, I usually flip the script: why should Disney have the right to tell everyone what they're allowed to do and not do with a picture and audio of a cartoon mouse for a person's actual entire life?
I am talking about professors taking the work of their students as their own, unpaid of course, and the students can't say much because their future depends on it. So before calling simple copyright infringement "slave labor", they should look at their own community. At least the professors whose work is illegally copied are not forced to do it by the ones taking it.
> any coerced or poorly remunerated work. [1]
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slave-labor
Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.
For an older example consider “awesome” (literally: inspiring awe)
In the linked example, I don't think the author in question meant to make light of slavery when comparing it to their victimhood.
Surprised to see someone casually admit that the most common type of human labor is slave labor.
Whether it was through serfdom, indentured servitute, state labor obligations, patriarchal labor obligations, or outright slavery - coerced human labor was a constant norm.
In Britain, quitting a job was criminal until 1875!
The idea that work is done almost exclusively through voluntary labor is a modern (post-WW2) reality, and even then mostly exclusive to Western, capitalist nations. Even in modern, non-capitalist society (Soviet Union, Maoist China) work was largely obligatory and assigned to you.
Of course, Marx would point out that all labor is obligatory if you need to work to eat. But I think he would even take for granted the ability for everyone to accept or reject what specific work they wanted to do.
One of the interesting things about copyright infringement is that if you weren't told it was happening, you'd never know.
Buying back your freedom has a specific price tag, in our economy. (Most people don't do the math though, because it is unpleasant. I would recommend doing the math.)
It is a recognized idiom in many English dialects:
> If people work very hard for long hours for very little money, you can refer to it as slave labor.
* https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/slave-l...
> very hard work for which people are paid very little
* https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slave-la...
> (informal) work that is very hard and very badly paid
* https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/americ...
See also "working in the salt mines" where people do not literally take sodium chloride out of the ground.
* https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/back+to+the+salt+mines
Your understanding of the word is not standard.
If you stop short of saying McDonalds workers are slaves, and that they are merely closer to being slaves, then you are agreeing with me.
Slavery is not being poorly compensated or coerced into work.
It kind of is though :/
Like I get what you're saying, minimum wage workers have an autonomy that slaves would not have. But in practice that autonomy is often not meaningful in any real way.
I don't know. I just think that "You're a hair above being a slave so it doesn't count as slavery" is probably not a hill worth dying on
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe an entry level aid in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus and genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job? Or would you argue there is no one poorly remunerated?
We call that "wage slavery" for a reason
It’s absolutely less than slavery.
Slaves are property. They have no rights. They can’t quit. They can’t claim unemployment or long-term disability. They can be summarily executed.
You can kind of fuck around idiomatically with the term slavery in some cultures. But not in ones that had chattel slavery.
It’s not and it’s absolutely ahistoric to make this claim. (Not disputing that it’s a popular view in some circles.)
> Work for a wage (AKA sell their time and/or bodies), or die
They can change employers. Slaves can’t do that in any system. If you want a proper comparison it’s to serfdom.
So, there has only ever been one type of slavery, and all slaves had the exact same set of restrictions? Yeah, nah, not with you on that.
And just because a wage slave can switch from McDonalds to Taco Bell, does not make them any less slaves.
You seem very tied to a very specific conception of slavery that only matches African-American slaves in the US. There is far more to it; it's about freedom. And if you think being poor your whole life, being allowed to switch fast food joints, never getting ahead and never having a chance to get ahead, never having any land because it's all already owned, that all that is freedom, well, you clearly have a different conception of freedom than I do, and I would never want to be subjected to yours.
Capitalism is really good at convincing people that this is the only way things can be, and freedom is the ability to sell your body and time. I reject that completely.
No. Nobody claimed this.
> seem very tied to a very specific conception of slavery that only matches African-American slaves in the US
I'm anchoring to that for discussions happening regarding conduct in America, yes. If minimum-wage jobs are literally slavery, then slavery–to a lot of Americans–isn't that bad, and slavery for Americans will by default mean slavery within the America context, i.e. chattel slavery.
That said, slavery has real definitions and tests, and words like subject and serf exist because people have been debating and defining these terms for millennia, regardless of Reddit or NewsMax's redefinition of these terms.
> that all that is freedom
Nobody argued this either.
> Capitalism is really good at convincing people that this is the only way things can be
Another straw man. We can raise the minimum wage and establish social guarantees without trivializing slavery.
Anthropic trained on illegally acquired Stanford professors' books
The article does not say the training was illegal (although does discuss the professors push for a licensing model).
The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
> While blocking the piracy of work to train AI
when I read the quote:
> “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,”
That's my mistake.
I went back and read the actual opinion, and while I'm disappointed that training an LLM is fair-use transformative, I'm hopeful about a trial on the subject of the pirated copies. But I'm also worried that the argument seems like it might succeed if such training is "one-shot" without the central library or repository of intermediate copies. And that doesn't seem like a good outcome. But maybe my pessimism here is also misplaced.
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
Seems strange. The question should be whether you legally have to do so or not. If you do whether it is impractical or not is not a reason to break the law. Perhaps it makes your business not feasible but so be it. If you ran a clothing store that required you steal from other brands and remix it for your customers, you couldn't say "it's impractical for me to get permission", no?
If this argument is extrapolated, why should streaming services get the rights to copyrighted works? It sounds like a lot of work.
Hell, why would Pirate Bay be any different than Anthropic in this case? Millions of pieces of copyrighted work, being used as intake rather than sold.
So you come with this amazing idea regarding anything... how to build a chip, how to write software... and you write a book on how to...
Then a model eat it... spit it for free (they could get an advantage from being able to exercise that logic) and it's fair use...
Then... why torrent it, can't they sent someone to buy the book and scan it or buy it in pdf?
When anthropic wants to gain money they say "our model hacked and we do not know why (damn it's so good)"
When using publications, "they have been used for learning" (not algorithmic compression)
Etc
Say you have this Math book and you rewrite it from third to first person and then replace all the sine examples with cosine and modify the exercises to have different numbers... is it stealing? you can buy 1 book, "train on it" and then generate your "personal original approved copy"
I’d call that the opposite of “suffering”.
But I do not think anyone using technology can say they have not seen “any benefit”. While it may be a small benefit for many, it is a useful tool that has contributed to a significant amount of code and information retrieval.
You could say “the downsides vastly outweigh the upsides” or “the societal impact causes suffering”. But to say there is 0 benefit seems like a lie.
If you have ever used an LLM chat bot to gather information and it was correct. If you have ever used a program that was written in part or full by an LLM. If you have read an article that used an LLM to find sources. If you have had an interesting discussion about the ethics of LLMs. All of these are a benefit, no matter how small.
In reality we won't see this behavior stop, until Anthropic is hit with a huge penalty sledgehammer that threatens its existence. This is a gold rush and without real consequences, nothing will change.
Are the late authors of Project Gutenberg also enslaved?
They've since bought vast numbers of second hand books and scanned those for training, which appears be legal.
Interesting phrasing from you, Simon. Is there any legal theory under which it should be illegal?
Like when people bring this up as if it's somehow just like acceptable.
It's not at all. That's utter bullshit. The people that run the courts have been bought out. They have no idea what the far-reaching consequences of this is.
- Anthropic et al basically grabbed whatever content they could to scan and train the model.
- The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.
- They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.
- Whether this a fair or illegal use of copyrighted text already seems like an adorably obsolete question. Regardless, the damage is basically done - they can neither prove one way or another how much any single text influenced their model and they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over.
- Rather than get stuck in court for decades splitting the hairs about copyright law, they wrote massive checks to the publishing industry and agreed to a bunch of restrictions around copyrights.
- For the foreseeable future, every independent copyright holder now has grounds to take grievances to Anthropic and get some form of compensation.
The court ruled that it was fair to train on books, but they had to acquire them legally. That's why these companies buy physical books and scan them now.
The Stanford professors in this article opted out of that last case and are trying to get higher payouts.
This is doing a lot of heavy lifting, especially when you consider the scale
It was how they got the books for training: they torrented collections of pirated ebooks. There are Slack messages from executives describing the process as "blatant violation of copyright." They were stealing books and they knew it.
They didn't start buying books legally and scanning them until much later.
> they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over
I would bet they do have copies on their hard-drives (which would probably be legal for them to possess for their own use, if the originals were obtained legally), and that they could simply omit them from their next training run that they probably do at major updates anyway.
No, the lawsuit was because they illegally acquired the books (e.g. downloading them from piracy websites)
These days they are sticking to more legal means like the one you described
I understand exactly what you mean by this, and you are wrong. If they did not copy them, it would not be possible to extricate copyrighted works out of the model like Harry Potter. You can argue against the copyright system, but don't pretend that what they've done is essentially an advanced form of copying. The data is in the weights.
As for the training being fair use, this is still disputed:
https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-ma...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/opinion/claude-pirated-bo...
Damn right too.
sounds bad...
> the article: "pirated the work of over 10 Stanford professors to train its Claude models"
that just... doesn't seem like much compared to so much other scraping though, right?
I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in.
Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.
After a 1.5 billion settlement, the professor/authors are saying it's not enough.
The judge had an interesting summary of AI:
"He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
We can argue about whether AI is a net-good for society and if the ends justify the means, but I think it's clear that a lot of people who worked very hard are getting fucked over. Is that okay? Are we really fine with piloting the idea "if you're rich enough you can do anything"?
Because, the reality is that if you or I did this, as many have done before, we would be getting sued to oblivion. Assuming we don't straight-up go to jail. But then AI superscalers do the same thing, on the order of 10,000, and somehow nobody goes to jail. Is that really the kind of message we want to send?
How about all the copyright MIT licensed open source software? When does it become discovered that they were scraped for training without authorization and without giving attribution?
... Which, if enforced vigorously, means new raw AI can only be trained by those who can afford the raw material.
The Court just handed Anthropic and other VC-backed AI projects a significant moat.
Very soon, all information will be free!
Or do you believe, all books should be free, authors shouldn’t be compensated ever? Why should we compensate programmers or any knowledge worker than if the fruits of their labor should thusly be freely distributed?
Supposedly the trillion dollar company isn’t in the set of “rich” here, but professors are.
Yet again, Anthropic is the good guys. Though I think this is just the same story from a while ago but told through a Stanford lens, AFAICT?
It's a book. It's meant for the masses to consume and read. And so a computer read it and add it to it's intelligence that everyone else can access. What's the big deal?
I don't think there is such a thing as copyright, patent or intellectual property rights in the AI world. What is the point of one human making another human pay to access the works of another human? There is no point but just accumulating wealth and superiority. Are we really going to sit here and ignore that maybe the professors had privileged lives and their parents or their ancestors enriched themselves on the backs of poor people.
Either way, whatever the arguments, democratize this knowledge. It sure as hell beats paying $300 for a textbook and requiring that for 1500 students every year. Give it all to the people. All of it. Let the people train open weight and smaller models that even more people can access. I'm all for this.
I do not think training an AI model is Fair Use, because LLM "training" is being used as a metaphor for building a matrix with a computer. Only people and animals train and learn; computers run statistical problems over input, which in this case was illegal input acquired by humans.
But it does not matter whether training LLMs is Fair Use, "Fair Use" is a strange and arbitrary legal term that can be expanded to include AI if we wish. This was organized crime whether or not LLM training on copyrighted materials is fair use. It was organized crime whether or not they planned to use them for AI at all.
AI is irrelevant. They could have trained it on GPL'd or MIT code (as long as they then distributed according to the terms of the licenses), and works in the public domain. They could have gotten what they were doing explicitly declared to be fair use by the Library of Congress, and then purchased the materials, like they are belatedly doing now. It wasn't necessary to violate copyright law to prove the technology. They could have proved the technology, then asked for copyright law to be clarified, and licensed huge volumes of works from the very few publishers we have left. Becoming a criminal organization was an explicit choice they made, and they discussed its illegality, and even the risk that it would be discussed on HN, which might inspire prosecution.
The reason they are not being prosecuted is because the rich are beyond the law; prosecutors will not prosecute them. The RICO statute is clear, and explicitly mentions copyright violation.
We can sentence the executives harshly, but go easy on the lower level people, because they are intelligent and valuable to advance the technology. The executives aren't necessary for anything. They're currently running finance scams that are extremely dangerous for the economy. They belong in prison to protect the public.
This is an option that people (real people, with names) have, and are not taking. When they say that they care about law and order, and are worried about the behavior of these companies, they are lying. Trump could literally nationalize them for what they've done. They're vulnerable to any state's attorney who has any author in their state whose book was downloaded. Libgen/Annas-archive would have been the most important honeypot in history.