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...
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.
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.
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.
Aaron broke into a network closet and actively circumvented MAC address bans. The comparison isn't meaningful. Anthropic downloaded theirs from libgen:
> Similar to the claims in Bartz, the plaintiffs allege that Anthropic illegally downloaded, reproduced and distributed their copyrighted books from “shadow libraries” like LibGen and PiLiMi, and that Anthropic broke the law by downloading and storing the pirated files in a central library.
Why isn't the comparison meaningful? Aaron broke the law and circumvented protections, Anthropic broke the law and circumvented protections. Regardless of if Aaron broke into a network closet or anthropic broke DRM, anthropic took explicit action to receive knowingly stolen goods.
Yes. This isn't even controversial. Aaron broke into a network to obtain papers. The CFAA is applied when someone breaks into a network. Downloading from libgen isn't breaking into a network.
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.
(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.
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.
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).
That professor saying that the use of work he already produced amounts to "slave labor"... copyright infringement is substantially different than slavery.
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe a nurse in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus of genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Of course they did, same with almost every other bit of training material that isn't synthetic (and still indirectly created with illegally obtained training data)
They were already eligible for damages as per the class-action settlement, but several Stanford professors actively opted out of the blanket class-action settlement to pursue Anthropic individually for higher damages.
There's a certain element of irony to all of this, what, with it being Stanford, the home of "forgiveness is easier to get than permission" and anti-regulation sentiment in the tech industry.
They should get Opus or one of the latest models to be the morality judge of what goes into training.
I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in.
Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.
It would be funny to ask the profs if they are allowed, by law, to read 3 textbooks on a subject and then write a 4th themselves.
After a 1.5 billion settlement, the professor/authors are saying it's not enough.
The judge had an interesting summary of AI:
"He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."
Does copyright over knowledge-based works really have any legitimate position in today's society? We're entering a new age of how information is created, used, and distributed.
> [The Congress shall have Power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.
Good! Information wants to be free, not locked up in some ivory tower. This is a great time upon us, when academics and ivy league elites can no longer gate keep knowledge and hoard it for their ego. Knowledge should benefit humanity as broadly as possible, not just the rich and their academic ilk.
This. It's funny how supposed hackers and freethinkers, most of whom likely pirated something multiple times in their lives, suddenly support copyright.
Why couldn’t they pay for the book to get that knowledge then?
Or do you believe, all books should be free, authors shouldn’t be compensated ever? Why should we compensate programmers or any knowledge worker than if the fruits of their labor should thusly be freely distributed?
It's not the information itself that get sold, but the specific composition of information arranged as a book. Work went into it and people who do it sell that rightfully.
Haha. I appreciate the intent behind this. HN will hate and downvote it of course, but we need constant reminders that we are emotional, take sides just like everyone else, and selectively get outraged about things.
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...
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.
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.
You’d have some standing if Anthropic actually acted in the interest of the public.
I think they're just pointing out how the wrong thing always happens to the little guy.
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.
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.
Libgen got them from Aaron Swartz in the network closet. Different stages of the same pipeline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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).
“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"
Thanks, Obama! (literally - https://www.techdirt.com/2013/03/07/holder-doj-used-discreti...)
Swartz made the mistake of not using it to make lots of money.
does n.b. mean nota bene?
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”.
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 dictionary.com entry clearly describes a hyperbolic use of the term, especially when it comes to 'poorly remunerated'
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.
Is $14/hour poor remuneration?
Yeah I think so.
You could say minimum wage at $7.25 but very few people actually make that (1%).
Or maybe a nurse in an eldery home making $11/hr and cleaning the anus of genitals of old men that are hitting on them. Would you agree $11/hr is poor remuneration for that kind of job?
That is an insane use of that term for cases like this one, even if present in wild.
Uneducated and privileged take by the professor.
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.
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.
I robbed the bank illegally.
But the car I bought with the money was totally legal.
Anthropic allegedly legally learned literature for large llms from illegally laundered illicit LibGen looted Stanford libraries?
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, I’ve changed the submission title from the author’s original.
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?
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.
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.
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. 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...
Of course they did, same with almost every other bit of training material that isn't synthetic (and still indirectly created with illegally obtained training data)
They 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.
Well. At least I can ask an LLM about the contents of papers I can't access!
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.
There's a certain element of irony to all of this, what, with it being Stanford, the home of "forgiveness is easier to get than permission" and anti-regulation sentiment in the tech industry.
They should get Opus or one of the latest models to be the morality judge of what goes into training.
I had an issue recently where I asked claude code to log into a developer user on Chrome on my local host for a system which is fully local and part of the code base the agent was developing and it refused to do it, like flat out refused, I did it on multiple sessions and I could not get Claude to budge on entering the credentials - it required me to manually sign in.
Would be amazing if they used that same level of training for their intake exercises.
It would be funny to ask the profs if they are allowed, by law, to read 3 textbooks on a subject and then write a 4th themselves.
After a 1.5 billion settlement, the professor/authors are saying it's not enough.
The judge had an interesting summary of AI:
"He compared AI training to how humans can read, internalize and remember a book’s themes and style. “Like any reader aspiring to be a writer, Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but to turn a hard corner and create something different,” he wrote."
Ability to pay might influence this outcome.
Good!
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.
well duh
Good! Information wants to be free, not locked up in some ivory tower. This is a great time upon us, when academics and ivy league elites can no longer gate keep knowledge and hoard it for their ego. Knowledge should benefit humanity as broadly as possible, not just the rich and their academic ilk.
This. It's funny how supposed hackers and freethinkers, most of whom likely pirated something multiple times in their lives, suddenly support copyright.
Very soon, all information will be free!
Why couldn’t they pay for the book to get that knowledge then?
Or do you believe, all books should be free, authors shouldn’t be compensated ever? Why should we compensate programmers or any knowledge worker than if the fruits of their labor should thusly be freely distributed?
It's not the information itself that get sold, but the specific composition of information arranged as a book. Work went into it and people who do it sell that rightfully.
Can I have your credit card and social please? Pretty sure that information wants to be free, too.
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.
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.
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?