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piltdownman 4 hours ago [-]
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...
giancarlostoro 1 hours ago [-]
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.
EleKtr1X 37 minutes ago [-]
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
Onavo 40 minutes ago [-]
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".
tourmalinetaco 14 minutes ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 53 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
giancarlostoro 47 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
Aurornis 45 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
jacquesm 16 minutes ago [-]
Oh that's ok then. /s
ffs
IncreasePosts 1 hours ago [-]
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
giancarlostoro 1 hours ago [-]
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.
artursapek 56 minutes ago [-]
Why did he deny the plea deal? I hadn't heard that part of this story before.
giancarlostoro 51 minutes ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
bsimpson 2 hours ago [-]
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.
iJohnDoe 19 minutes ago [-]
Name her and her office.
shimman 1 hours ago [-]
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.
JumpCrisscross 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
shimman 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
DannyPage 3 hours ago [-]
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.
NegativeLatency 2 hours ago [-]
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.
gbacon 56 minutes ago [-]
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.
smallmancontrov 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the "profit motive makes it right" idea that permeates our culture and law is bass ackwards.
fasterik 1 hours ago [-]
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.
__MatrixMan__ 1 hours ago [-]
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.
gbacon 52 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
fasterik 58 minutes ago [-]
"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.
__MatrixMan__ 15 minutes ago [-]
Maybe not intrinsically, but until it stops hurting people in practice, we are going to remain suspicious.
55 minutes ago [-]
1 hours ago [-]
throwitaway222 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Vaushite 2 hours ago [-]
I think they're just pointing out how the wrong thing always happens to the little guy.
acuteaura 2 hours ago [-]
You’d have some standing if Anthropic actually acted in the interest of the public.
TheCoelacanth 1 hours ago [-]
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.
legitster 59 minutes ago [-]
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.
sillysaurusx 3 hours ago [-]
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.
malfist 3 hours ago [-]
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.
sillysaurusx 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Libgen got them from Aaron Swartz in the network closet. Different stages of the same pipeline.
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
The same libgen which is illegal in the US and whose sources include those obtained by Aaron Swarz? That libgen?
sillysaurusx 3 hours ago [-]
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.
piltdownman 2 hours ago [-]
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.
(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.
big money hoarders don't care about details. great picture you've painted here.
Vaushite 2 hours ago [-]
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.
FireBeyond 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
lossolo 2 hours ago [-]
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.
piltdownman 2 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
esnyder9 36 minutes ago [-]
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.
john_strinlai 4 hours ago [-]
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).
igl 2 hours ago [-]
“Corrupt third-world country” is what we’ll end up calling most Western countries if we keep applying double standards in our justice systems.
RobotToaster 2 hours ago [-]
The USA is a third world country in a Gucci belt
Vaushite 2 hours ago [-]
"Third-world" means "not allied with the US or with Russia"
GolfPopper 1 hours ago [-]
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."
2OEH8eoCRo0 2 hours ago [-]
Swartz made the mistake of not using it to make lots of money.
a3w 3 hours ago [-]
does n.b. mean nota bene?
7e 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pembrook 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bko 3 hours ago [-]
> you'd rather autistically defer to the bizarre overlapping and bureaucratic rule-making nuances of a flawed, regularly-abused legal system
What is the law besides "bizarre overlapping and bureaucratic rule making"? You can't charge people on vibes like "underlying values and beliefs"
nkrisc 3 hours ago [-]
No you do the opposite: you don’t charge those whose underlying values and beliefs you agree with. Everyone has broken some law.
pembrook 3 hours ago [-]
The law is not some immutable thing, in fact its something that we humans evolve over time on a case by case basis to improve and adjust.
Hence why bringing up a case where justice was not served proportionally presents an opportunity to discuss where potential improvements could be made or errors were committed.
I know it makes people who take comfort in institutions and rules uncomfortable to bring up the fact that none of this is real and all of it is a construct.
But we can in fact improve "the law" and have done so basically since the beginning of time, hence how the current law came to be. In the US specifically, this is literally the basis of how common law works (bottoms up vs. top down).
orochimaaru 3 hours ago [-]
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”.
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.
Aurornis 32 minutes ago [-]
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.
markasoftware 28 minutes ago [-]
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
zzrrt 32 minutes ago [-]
> 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 is probably legal for them to possess for their own use), and that they could simply omit them from their next training run that they probably do at major updates anyway.
awakeasleep 3 hours ago [-]
That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.
thephyber 3 hours ago [-]
"Slave labor" doesn't always refer to chattel 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.
viklove 27 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
rpdillon 29 minutes ago [-]
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.
DocTomoe 2 hours ago [-]
That dictionary.com entry clearly describes a hyperbolic use of the term, especially when it comes to 'poorly remunerated'
matkoniecz 2 hours ago [-]
That is an insane use of that term for cases like this one, even if present in wild.
nonethewiser 2 hours ago [-]
Poorly remunerated work is slavery? Seriously? Are you really going to assert that Jane Doe making $14/hr at McDonald’s is a slave?
And on the coercion side your definition includes jury duty.
Your definition doesn't work.
throw0101c 1 hours ago [-]
> Your definition doesn't work.
It is a recognized idiom in many English dialects:
> If people work very hard for long hours for very little money, you can refer to it as slave labor.
Are you telling me that you think jurors and minimum wage workers are slaves?
albedoa 56 minutes ago [-]
Buddy, you are arguing by proxy with the dictionary, which is a descriptivist text. Go yell at Merriam-Webster.
Your understanding of the word is not standard.
nonethewiser 54 minutes ago [-]
Do you think jurors and minimum wage workers are slaves?
jonathanstrange 15 minutes ago [-]
It's marked as an informal disapproving use, so it depends on whether you want to convey this message or not. But Yes, a juror could say "What we had to do was slave labor, we didn't even get proper breaks" and you would perfectly well understand what they said and meant with that message.
anigbrowl 1 hours ago [-]
McDonald's workers are certainly closer to being slaves than any professor at Stanford. That's one reason California established a minimum $20/hr for foodservice work. Even when the work is largely a matter of tending machines rather than the application of hard-won culinary skills, it's still hot, dangerous, dirty, and demanding.
nonethewiser 56 minutes ago [-]
>McDonald's workers are certainly closer to being slaves than any professor at Stanford.
If you stop short of saying McDonalds workers are slaves, and that they are merely closer to being slaves, then you are agreeing with me.
Slavery is not being poorly compensated or coerced into work.
Vaushite 2 hours ago [-]
Is $14/hour poor remuneration?
nonethewiser 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah I think so.
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe an entry level aid in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus and genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job? Or would you argue there is no one poorly remunerated?
crab2 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
j45 2 hours ago [-]
Uneducated and privileged take by the professor.
kenmacd 4 hours ago [-]
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).
alistairSH 4 hours ago [-]
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.
kenmacd 4 hours ago [-]
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)
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
Copyright maximalists would argue that even making a copy in RAM would be copyright infringement.
opello 2 hours ago [-]
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!
HotHotLava 2 hours ago [-]
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.
car 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I concur and have changed the author’s original title to better represent the article.
jawilson2 4 hours ago [-]
I robbed the bank illegally.
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
frangonf 4 hours ago [-]
Anthropic allegedly legally learned literature for large llms from illegally laundered illicit LibGen looted Stanford libraries?
xlayn 4 hours ago [-]
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?
karmakurtisaani 3 hours ago [-]
Torrenting just scales better, I think it's simple as that.
drfloyd51 2 hours ago [-]
Torrenting doesn’t make anyone money. So no way to pay off senators and judges.
AlienRobot 22 minutes ago [-]
I wonder why would anyone write a book if an LLM company can just buy 1 copy and reproduce it forever?
Sha1rholder 3 hours ago [-]
Humanity is suffering from large scale distillation attack from Anthropic.
lambdaone 3 hours ago [-]
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.
paxy 1 hours ago [-]
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”.
bigstrat2003 1 hours ago [-]
I have yet to see any benefit from LLMs. I think "suffering" is apt here.
CPUHall 4 hours ago [-]
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.
simonw 3 hours ago [-]
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.
rpdillon 27 minutes ago [-]
> which appears be legal.
Interesting phrasing from you, Simon. Is there any legal theory under which it should be illegal?
FireBeyond 18 minutes ago [-]
Appears to be legal in that current rulings and legislation say that to do so does not run afoul of fair use.
HDThoreaun 2 hours ago [-]
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.
car 4 hours ago [-]
Thanks, I’ve changed the submission title from the author’s original.
sedan_baklazhan 45 minutes ago [-]
So as I’ve been told here numerous times, “AI companies do not steal”.
Ah ok.
mkw5053 4 hours ago [-]
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)
lioeters 2 hours ago [-]
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.
ceroxylon 2 hours ago [-]
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?
hollowonepl 3 hours ago [-]
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)
pier25 3 hours ago [-]
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:
They did the same with literally everyone's data. Is it supposed to matter more because a "Stanford professor's" work was included?
piltdownman 4 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
vb-8448 1 hours ago [-]
You don't say!
NelsonMinar 3 hours ago [-]
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.
bushido 4 hours ago [-]
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.
lenerdenator 2 hours ago [-]
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.
nba456_ 3 hours ago [-]
Good!
neutronicus 2 hours ago [-]
Well. At least I can ask an LLM about the contents of papers I can't access!
pluc 3 hours ago [-]
Didn't it train Claude on illegally obtained everything?
j45 2 hours ago [-]
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."
j45 2 hours ago [-]
Ability to pay might influence this outcome.
linuxftw 4 hours ago [-]
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.
thephyber 3 hours ago [-]
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.
linuxftw 2 hours ago [-]
I'm familiar with the document. We've reached the terminal progress where copyright is useful to society.
eesmith 2 hours ago [-]
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.
linuxftw 1 hours ago [-]
That's just your opinion. I think copyright is immoral.
AlienRobot 21 minutes ago [-]
That's just your opinion.
eesmith 1 hours ago [-]
Then lead with that, and don't try to justify it based on some perceived cultural shift.
bbor 40 minutes ago [-]
“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?
shadowgovt 1 hours ago [-]
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.
iamleppert 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Marha01 2 hours ago [-]
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!
bigstrat2003 16 minutes ago [-]
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.
sedan_baklazhan 43 minutes ago [-]
> not just the rich
Supposedly the trillion dollar company isn’t in the set of “rich” here, but professors are.
kemotep 3 hours ago [-]
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?
bulbar 4 hours ago [-]
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.
_doctor_love 3 hours ago [-]
Can I have your credit card and social please? Pretty sure that information wants to be free, too.
qwerpy 4 hours ago [-]
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.
pessimizer 2 hours ago [-]
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.
DeluluDon 8 minutes ago [-]
Since you've made such an outstanding case, you can file the federal complaint.
correlatequint 2 hours ago [-]
well duh
thenatureboy 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
blamestross 3 hours ago [-]
The primary value of a LLM is automated intellectual property laundering.
Marha01 2 hours ago [-]
Good. "Intellectual property" is bullshit and should be abolished. Information wants to be free.
Right?
N.B. JSTOR explicitly settled with Swartz, suffered no financial harm, and begged the federal government to drop the case. The government refused and prosecuted Swartz anyway. Anthropic settled for $1.5 billion primarily because of the theft and storage of the files, but this was somehow a Civil issue...
If you're unaware of who he was, or what happened to him:
* He was one of 12 others who helped to spec out RSS' standard (when he was 14 years old).
* He is widely considered a co-founder of reddit, after merging with reddit, he rewrote the majority of its codebase from Lisp to Python.
* He was one of the reasons Reddit protested SOPA back in the day (the same day that good 'old Kim Dotcom was raided and arrested by the US, the irony of which being that they swore up and down that they needed SOPA in order to do what they did to Kim Dotcom).
* I didn't know this before: he also developed the markdown publishing format with John Gruber.
What happened to him?
He was charged with felonies for stealing PDFs for publicly funded research papers, he was tried as if he hacked these systems. He took his own life as a result of them throwing decades of prison time at him for what's hardly a serious hacking offense (seriously, Kevin Mitnick was way worse). Kevin Mitnick served five years, they were looking to throw up to 35 years at him, and a minimum sentence of seven years if he went to trial.
It is abhorrent to me that we have people doing more malicious hacks that get no repercussions. Someone at OpenAI / Anthropic should be 100% liable for criminal charges of what their AI models do. Need I remind everyone, that these models can run way faster than what we common folk can see, the speed at which they run these models internally can go so quickly that by the time the model is discovered to have hacked someone, it could very well be too late. Just try the "fast" feature of Claude Code, now imagine Claude launching thousands of sub-agents at top speed internally, the capacity for unprecedented destruction is the most concerning thing to me, I say that as someone who uses Claude every week.
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.
I'm aware, though I will note, in the case of Kevin Mitnick the crimes were abhorrent, and I am sure Aaron was 100% in the wrong, and I don't think he should have gotten a slap on the wrist, but felonies + prison time for a few publicly funded PDFs is a bit drastic.
To be fair, I'm trying to remember things that happened over a decade ago, I could get some things wrong. I think me and you agree for the most part either way.
The reason I know these things is because I remembered it the same way you did up until a few years ago. Then I re-read the case and was surprised at how much it differed from the version that has been repeated everywhere for years.
ffs
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.
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.
We shouldn't be using that as precedent; in fact, it should be the opposite.
No precedent was set. Nothing went to court. To the extent there is precedent it’s in the prosecutor’s career having been ruined by that stain. Using that failed prosecution to attack anyone risks it becoming actual precedent.
You're thinking of something unrelated.
We can totally take these civil crimes and turn them into a variety of felonies, with any luck we could put some software devs in federal prison too. Maybe after a few dozen of them get locked away for 10 years our profession might take ethics seriously.
Who? Name names. You are making a bold, broad claim. Who are these specific people against whom you have specific evidence of their willingness to “distribute contaminated food … quite readily in service to their bottom line”?
A quote from that page:
> FDA’s leading hypothesis remains that this was likely an act of economically motivated adulteration.
Maybe the cinnamon case was an isolated incident, but the use of lead compounds to change a food's color is a trend. Per https://www.npr.org/2024/10/24/nx-s1-5119336/cinnamon-lead-f...
> We're aware of this practice in turmeric, where lead chromate has been added to enhance the color
Are you actually going to argue that people don't do things that are unsafe for others when money is on the line? We're living in an ocean of evidence that it happens.
Otherwise we're creating a system where it is unfair for some people.
Selective application of the law in favor of the rich and powerful is a perversion of justice, even if it does sometimes result in more just outcomes in individual cases.
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.
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Say you have a network. You want to keep someone out of it. The tool for that is the CFAA.
If you have a book, and you want to stop someone from reproducing it, the tool for that is copyright.
They cover different domains. If you're not breaking into a network, you're unlikely to be charged under the CFAA.
(1) They admitted its Claude models had breached the systems of three companies since April; including Huggingface.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-07-30/anthropic...
(2) More to the point, it 100% breached the CFAA by securing unauthorised access to a U.S. state government website hosting election-related data, pulling aggregate vote-count statistics from a gated government dashboard. The state government itself confirmed the access was entirely unauthorised.
https://seekingalpha.com/news/4657023-anthropics-claude-bypa...
If a human security researcher had deployed an agent that behaved this way, it would constitute a textbook felony under the CFAA for accessing those systems without authorisation.
Unfortunately different rules apply when you have the power to buy off Congress and the Appeals Courts.
Most recently a US appeals court ruled on 5 August that Amazon was unlikely to succeed on a claim that Perplexity's AI agents violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by covertly accessing private Amazon customer accounts.
https://www.rte.ie/news/technology/2026/0807/1586941-artific...
RIP Aaron Swartz.
Criminal law, "beyond a reasonable doubt", doesn't mean "there exists, however implausible, an explanation".
He did break into the network - he was spoofing MAC addresses. You don't have a level of technical sophistication allowing you to do this, and then say "oh, I assumed the server closet with an "Authorized access only" sign, usually locked, seemed like a safe place, that's all, and since I was there, I figured I might as well just plug directly into a network switch in there."
Many judges are not technical. Most judges are not idiots.
For example, if the item was derived from a repository of stolen goods that was already illegal in the US on the basis of it being a repository of stolen goods.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/09/pirate-library-m...
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.
If he were still here, he would be 40 in only a couple of weeks.
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."
What is the law besides "bizarre overlapping and bureaucratic rule making"? You can't charge people on vibes like "underlying values and beliefs"
Hence why bringing up a case where justice was not served proportionally presents an opportunity to discuss where potential improvements could be made or errors were committed.
I know it makes people who take comfort in institutions and rules uncomfortable to bring up the fact that none of this is real and all of it is a construct.
But we can in fact improve "the law" and have done so basically since the beginning of time, hence how the current law came to be. In the US specifically, this is literally the basis of how common law works (bottoms up vs. top down).
But the rich buy “justice”. Us plebes are meant to “face justice”.
- Anthropic et al basically grabbed whatever content they could to scan and train the model.
- The vast majority of what they scanned were books they bought at wholesale in big lots. Stuff being weeded out from Goodwills or libraries and (mostly) bound for destruction anyway.
- They didn't copy the texts per-se, they studied the relationships between words to build a statistical/predictive model of natural language.
- Whether this a fair or illegal use of copyrighted text already seems like an adorably obsolete question. Regardless, the damage is basically done - they can neither prove one way or another how much any single text influenced their model and they cannot unscramble the egg without starting over.
- Rather than get stuck in court for decades splitting the hairs about copyright law, they wrote massive checks to the publishing industry and agreed to a bunch of restrictions around copyrights.
- For the foreseeable future, every independent copyright holder now has grounds to take grievances to Anthropic and get some form of compensation.
The court ruled that it was fair to train on books, but they had to acquire them legally. That's why these companies buy physical books and scan them now.
The Stanford professors in this article opted out of that last case and are trying to get higher payouts.
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 cannot unscramble the egg without starting over
I would bet they do have copies on their hard-drives (which is probably legal for them to possess for their own use), and that they could simply omit them from their next training run that they probably do at major updates anyway.
> any coerced or poorly remunerated work. [1]
[1] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/slave-labor
Someone who makes this statement this really want us to equate it with racist chattel slavery - the most heinous form of worker exploitation in modern memory. "Oh, I just meant: {the most common type of work in human history}" as a retreat is not very compelling.
Surprised to see someone casually admit that the most common type of human labor is slave labor.
One of the interesting things about copyright infringement is that if you weren't told it was happening, you'd never know.
And on the coercion side your definition includes jury duty.
Your definition doesn't work.
It is a recognized idiom in many English dialects:
> If people work very hard for long hours for very little money, you can refer to it as slave labor.
* https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/slave-l...
> very hard work for which people are paid very little
* https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/slave-la...
> (informal) work that is very hard and very badly paid
* https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/americ...
See also "working in the salt mines" where people do not literally take sodium chloride out of the ground.
* https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/back+to+the+salt+mines
Your understanding of the word is not standard.
If you stop short of saying McDonalds workers are slaves, and that they are merely closer to being slaves, then you are agreeing with me.
Slavery is not being poorly compensated or coerced into work.
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe an entry level aid in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus and genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job? Or would you argue there is no one poorly remunerated?
Anthropic trained on illegally acquired Stanford professors' books
The article does not say the training was illegal (although does discuss the professors push for a licensing model).
The noteworthy thing here, IMO, is the judge seems to have explicitly stated that using legally-acquired works to train AI models falls under fair use.
What the actual ruling found was that the professors should have been paid some tens of dollars for 1 copy of their book.
(Whether you agree with it or not is another matter)
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
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?
I’d call that the opposite of “suffering”.
They've since bought vast numbers of second hand books and scanned those for training, which appears be legal.
Interesting phrasing from you, Simon. Is there any legal theory under which it should be illegal?
As for the training being fair use, this is still disputed:
https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-ma...
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/24/opinion/claude-pirated-bo...
Damn right too.
I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in.
Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.
After a 1.5 billion settlement, the professor/authors are saying it's not enough.
The judge had an interesting summary of AI:
"He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
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?
... Which, if enforced vigorously, means new raw AI can only be trained by those who can afford the raw material.
The Court just handed Anthropic and other VC-backed AI projects a significant moat.
Very soon, all information will be free!
Supposedly the trillion dollar company isn’t in the set of “rich” here, but professors are.
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?
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.