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...
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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 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.
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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
>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.
putting morality to the side in favor of legal pragmatism , certain jurisdictions classify the act of accessing data without prior authority as data espionage
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Do you have any examples of this practice? Any evidence that it is significant?
As a long time professor and colleague of many other professors, I have never seen this happen.
I suppose it must happen occasionally, since there are unethical assholes in every profession. But I would be very surprised to see evidence of more than trace amounts.
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.
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.
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.
> “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.
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"
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)
> “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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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
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 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)
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
“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?
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.
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...
Thanks, Obama! (literally - https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/07/holder-doj-used-discreti...)
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).
does n.b. mean nota bene?
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.
The same libgen which is illegal in the US and whose sources include those obtained by Aaron Swarz? That libgen?
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.
Well if you really want to get into legal rather than moral distinctions, the company has already admitting to breaching the CFAA twice.
(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.
big money hoarders don't care about details. great picture you've painted here.
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.
Let's ignore every other aspect of this case.
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.
I think Aaron was not an MIT student. So not really authorized on that network in the first place.
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.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-m...
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.
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.
The CFAA is for unauthorized access to a computer system. Downloading from libgen isn't unauthorized access that can be prosecuted under the CFAA.
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.
This is correct. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1030
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50263074 This comment explains how they did break the CFAA multiple times, got caught red-handed, and got a slap on the wrist.
Libgen got them from Aaron Swartz in the network closet. Different stages of the same pipeline.
And only a crime in one of them.
Thank you for pointing this out. I always make this comparison when saying these people are thieves and should be subject to the same prosecution.
But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.
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.
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.
Yeah, the "profit motive makes it right" idea that permeates our culture and law is bass ackwards.
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.
"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.
Maybe not intrinsically, but until it stops hurting people in practice, we are going to remain suspicious.
> 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”?
The incident I had in mind is described here: https://www.fda.gov/food/outbreaks-foodborne-illness/investi...
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.
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.
You’d have some standing if Anthropic actually acted in the interest of the public.
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.
I think they're just pointing out how the wrong thing always happens to the little guy.
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.
“Corrupt third-world country” is what we’ll end up calling most Western countries if we keep applying double standards in our justice systems.
The USA is a third world country in a Gucci belt
"Third-world" means "not allied with the US or with Russia"
That was the original meaning, yes.
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."
Swartz made the mistake of not using it to make lots of money.
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.
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.
> precedent has been set
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?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
Name her and her office.
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.
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 offered a 6 month plea deal. He took his own life due to depression. Something he tried to do multiple times in the past
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.
Why did he deny the plea deal? I hadn't heard that part of this story before.
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.
Why do you need to add that last sentence?
> 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.
> 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.
> [...] for a few publicly funded PDFs is a bit drastic.
It was 4.8 million PDFs, which I think is a bit more than "a few".
In today’s world, this is both a few and fair use. You just need to claim that you’re going to train models for research purposes.
Oh that's ok then. /s
ffs
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.
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.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Progress
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Wikler
[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmen_Ortiz
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.
Sadly, we'll never know.
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.
According to Wikipedia, Heymann was involved in two computer programmer suicides? Just what the hell are they doing there? Isn't Mass a liberal state?
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 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.
[1] https://volokh.com/2013/01/14/aaron-swartz-charges/
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20130211030902/https://www.popeh...
>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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz
I don’t think plugging a laptop to an open switch port and launching a script to scrape webpages to get PDFs to an external drive is hacking per se.
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.
putting morality to the side in favor of legal pragmatism , certain jurisdictions classify the act of accessing data without prior authority as data espionage
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.
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.
> 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.
We've been impersonating home users en masse to scrape the whole web to verify ad network integrity for I think two decades now, at least.
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?
• 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.
> he was again concealing his actions because he knew they were wrong.
No, you conceal your actions if you believe others will try to stop you. It has nothing to do with right or 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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not the person you replied to, but I assume it was more of an overly broad generalization than an intentional attempt at "myth-building".
A lot (but yes, not all) of that research is publicly funded and then locked away behind corporate paywalls.
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.
The humanities being cheaper than STEM is irrelevant to this thread about Schwarz bulk-downloading a source of myriad copyrighted papers.
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.
Who specifically was involved in that and what are they up to now?
> government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway
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.
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.
> The distinction is that Aaron Schwartz was intentionally pirating research papers
And, you know, all of the intentional, physical, artfully-planned means by which he did so.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I hope the Stanford profs got paid... this alum is still owed $60k for ANT pirating my books.
> “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.
It's a strange kind of conceptualization of slavery that extracts zero work from the victim.
That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.
"Slave labor" doesn't always refer to chattel slavery.
> any coerced or poorly remunerated work. [1]
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slave-labor
That is an insane use of that term for cases like this one, even if present in wild.
That dictionary.com entry clearly describes a hyperbolic use of the term, especially when it comes to 'poorly remunerated'
This is a classic "motte and bailey" argument.
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.
> the most common type of work in human history
Surprised to see someone casually admit that the most common type of human labor is slave labor.
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.
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.)
Uneducated and privileged take by the professor.
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.
Do you have any examples of this practice? Any evidence that it is significant?
As a long time professor and colleague of many other professors, I have never seen this happen.
I suppose it must happen occasionally, since there are unethical assholes in every profession. But I would be very surprised to see evidence of more than trace amounts.
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.
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.
The title is (I believe intentionally) inaccurate. Better would be:
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).
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)
Copyright maximalists would argue that even making a copy in RAM would be copyright infringement.
Which seems to open the door to arguments like: I'm not consuming pirated media, I'm studying it for my aspiring content creation pivot!
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.
Thanks, I concur and have changed the author’s original title to better represent the article.
Anthropic allegedly legally learned literature for large llms from illegally laundered illicit LibGen looted Stanford libraries?
I robbed the bank illegally.
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
> “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?
I was thinking the same thing reading that.
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.
Training on the book being fair use for something whose whole deal is to take those ideas and exercise them is the steal of our time...
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?
Torrenting just scales better, I think it's simple as that.
Torrenting doesn’t make anyone money. So no way to pay off senators and judges.
I wonder why would anyone write a book if an LLM company can just buy 1 copy and reproduce it forever?
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"
I imagine it's the same reason a lot of people pirate content instead of buying it legally. It's cheaper and faster.
Neural network is a method of compression. Lossy compression. What the AI companies want to push constantly is misconception:
And
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)
Etc
> “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?
Humanity is suffering from large scale distillation attack from Anthropic.
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.
A few books are getting pirated and the knowledge in those books is furthering our understanding of the world (among many other helpful uses).
I’d call that the opposite of “suffering”.
I have yet to see any benefit from LLMs. I think "suffering" is apt here.
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.
I think they should rename company to Misanthropic due to the excessive scale they are distilling humanity.
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.
Thanks, I’ve changed the submission title from the author’s original.
Anthropic also claimed that those pirated books had not been used to train their models.
They've since bought vast numbers of second hand books and scanned those for training, which appears be legal.
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.
> which appears be legal.
Interesting phrasing from you, Simon. Is there any legal theory under which it should be illegal?
Appears to be legal in that current rulings and legislation say that to do so does not run afoul of fair use.
LLMs can reproduce the training data verbatim, under some circumstances. They have to be trained not to.
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.
But it's only the Chinese openweight model companies that are stealing anything, aren't they?
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.
> They didn't copy the texts per-se
> 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 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.
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
This is doing a lot of heavy lifting, especially when you consider the scale
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 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.
I’m fine with it as long as Anthropic is fine we can distill their models to create own without burning all that energy (vide DeepSeek case)
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)
Of course they did. AI companies have pirated and stolen all sorts of content. What we know of is probably only the tip of the iceberg.
As for the training being fair use, this is still disputed:
https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-ma...
> the title
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?
That's the Stanford angle. It was millions of pirated books.
A single act of copyright infringement is a crime... a billion is a statistic!
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.
They did the same with literally everyone's data. Is it supposed to matter more because a "Stanford professor's" work was included?
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/opinion/claude-pirated-bo...
Damn right too.
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?
It's all built on stolen content.
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.
So as I’ve been told here numerous times, “AI companies do not steal”. Ah ok.
I think pushing ahead to a jury trial is a smart move. In the current climate you have a good chance of a very favorable jury pool.
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?
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.
Did someone illegally press control-c and control-v again?
Well. At least I can ask an LLM about the contents of papers I can't access!
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."
Good!
It’s so sad to watch humanity decide to go out with a whimper, yelling hopelessly at the machine.
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.
US Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8:
> [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.
I'm familiar with the document. We've reached the terminal progress where copyright is useful to society.
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.
That's just your opinion. I think copyright is immoral.
Then lead with that, and don't try to justify it based on some perceived cultural shift.
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.
That's just your opinion.
it never should have had any place, it never made sense, it's always created more problems than it solved
Ability to pay might influence this outcome.
You don't say!
Very much worth noting here is the ruling due not say the training is the issue; it says the acquisition of the training material is the issue.
... 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.
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.
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.
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.
Can I have your credit card and social please? Pretty sure that information wants to be free, too.
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?
This. It's funny how supposed hackers and freethinkers, most of whom likely pirated something multiple times in their lives, suddenly support copyright.
Very soon, all information will be free!
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.
> not just the rich
Supposedly the trillion dollar company isn’t in the set of “rich” here, but professors are.
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?
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.
Since you've made such an outstanding case, you can file the federal complaint.
well duh
The primary value of a LLM is automated intellectual property laundering.
Good. "Intellectual property" is bullshit and should be abolished. Information wants to be free.
Didn't it train Claude on illegally obtained everything?
Why is this surprising? It's all built on theft.