Copyright For Me, Not For Thee

On March 31, Anthropic accidentally left a source map file in its 2.1.88 Claude Code npm package when the company updated the AI tool, essentially providing a map to its proprietary code. The leak revealed the engineering “harness” and techniques used to make Claude operate as an autonomous agent.

Panic ensued. More than 8,000 takedown notices were issued, a number later trimmed to 96. No customer data was exposed, Anthropic said.

Anthropic shredded and scanned millions of books to train its models vi a secret initiative called Project Panama. Internal documents revealed the company knew how bad it looked: “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”

• This was just the start, as like Meta, Anthropic has used pirated content as well.

Here we find a company that downloaded millions of pirated books from the shadow library LibGen and a site called “Pirate Library Mirror” to train its AI suddenly issuing scads of takedown notices to Github and other respositories to protect its copyrighted code. It smacks of hypocrisy of a grand scale.

But cyberlibertarians and technologists seem to have no respect for the work of others. They come off as a self-centered, self-aggrandizing bunch, full of ego and not embracing things like introspection or reflection, which is for losers.

• It’s a delicious comeuppance for a company whose disdain for other people’s copyrighted works ended in a $1.5 billion settlement last year after a judge deemed it illegal.
  • Another case involving music is ongoing, with the AAP filing an amicus brief last month along with others in our space.

Destroying culture to ingest it, and then panicking when their own efforts might be leveraged by others — that about says it all about how these people think and the respect they have for other creators.

Book Recommendation

With the moon on our minds, it’s the perfect time to read a great book about it: