The Tech Mongols and the Great Heist of Intellectual Property

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE-AI, 10 Nov 2025

Peter Maguire | Sour Milk - TRANSCEND Media Service

Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: bridesandyou.com

Monopoly Capitalism and the Destruction of Intellectual Culture

6 Nov 2025 – After the monopoly capitalists of Big Tech gained control of the US media (Skydance, Amazon, Google, AT&T, Comcast) and the modern channels of mass communication (X, YouTube, Meta, TikTok), it was only natural for them to move on to plundering the world’s intellectual property (IP). Like dairy cows that must eat 100 pounds of grass and drink 30 gallons of water each day to produce decent milk, AI engines must ingest similarly huge quantities of IP to “train” their AI engines to produce decent “content.”

The time is long overdue that we replace the word “train” with “steal” and “content” with “intellectual property” because after AI ingests any and all IP, they own it. As the great legal scholar William Blackstone pointed out, “The law holds possession to be a great reason in favor of the possessor, and will favor such possession against any other title.” Worse than robbing low-paid authors like myself of their work, Big Tech then gets to filter, censor, selectively edit, and ultimately decide what parts of my books and articles a reader gets to see.

“Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft, Google, xAI, and OpenAI are competing to vacuum up as much data as humanly possible in a race to develop their respective AI models,” wrote investigative journalist Lee Fang. “The most prized training data, it turns out, are vast quantities of copyrighted material, largely in the form of published works such as academic articles, novels, and nonfiction books.”

I am now a party in the class action lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic PBC. Three of my books—Law and War, Facing Death in Cambodia, and Thai Stick—are among the 500,000 copywritten publications stolen by the AI company Anthropic “to train” for their latest, greatest AI creation, “Claude.” My copywritten books, all published by Columbia University Press, were just a fraction of the seven million pirated “texts” (books, articles, online writing) that Anthropic fed their AI beast.

For Big Tech companies worth billions, whatever legal fallout they face is simply the cost of business. In 2024, Anthropic offered to settle the case for $1.5 billion, but thankfully, Judge William Alsup, who is presiding over the ongoing Bartz v. Anthropic PBC case, expressed his doubts about the proposed settlement. “This deal feels like it could be ‘forced down the throat’ of authors,” Alsup wrote, “and I am uneasy about whether a fair share of the funds will actually reach writers.” For me, the Anthropic settlement would mean $9000, at best, for thirty years of work that required extensive time, money, travel and risk. This body of work has featured in major trials, stood up in court, and put me on government watchlists for pointing out unpleasant truths.

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC is hardly an isolated case. Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms showed that Meta stole pirated books (Library Genesis) from Russian servers to feed their latest, greatest, AI beast. “The litigation produced emails and documents showing Meta employees admitting that ‘torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃,’” wrote Lee Fang. “In one exchange, engineers noted that use of the illegal content had been escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as ‘MZ’) and that the decision was ‘approved to use.’”

A lack of accountability for the powerful and a deep sense of powerlessness and uncertainty for the rest is a conspicuous feature of our times. Rather than succumb to it, I started Fainting Robin Foundation (501c3) in 2018. In my original mission statement, I wrote: “Over the last fifteen years, support for independent scholarship outside an increasingly narrow mainstream has vanished. ‘Publish or perish’ has devolved into ‘publish and perish’ because most academic presses, magazines, and online publications pay, at best, NAFTA inspired wages for writing, photography, and fine art—the ‘content’—that fills their pages. All of the creative professions are under siege from the new economic model that rewards those who monetize the creations of others, but does not reward the actual creators. During the past two decades, writers, artists, musicians, and photographers have become subordinate to and dependent on ‘free rider monopoly platforms’ like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon. As Jonathan Taplin put it in The New York Times, ‘The rise of the digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries in our country.’”

The issues I outlined in that original mission statement—the death of independent journalism, the failure of American education and Big Tech’s assault on the creative professions—have now grown into societal problems that are undermining America’s ability to compete in the twenty-first century. Today, many students in the U.S. cannot read, write, or do basic math, much less think critically. The 450,000 students tested last year by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEA), also known as “America’s Report Card,” scored the lowest in the survey’s history. Only 35% of high school seniors could read proficiently and 22% could do grade level math. According to the NAEA, our nation faces “a significant educational crisis.”

Rather than addressing the problem by focusing on low-tech remedial education in reading, writing, and math, our schools simply lower their standards in the name of “student success” and embrace the very technology that is killing them. ChatGPT and speech recognition software have caused a pandemic of AI-driven intellectual dishonesty in all levels of education. Plagiarism is now endemic. “AI has infected higher education like a deathwatch beetle, hollowing out sound structures from the inside until the imminent collapse,” wrote English professor Mark Massaro. “The use of AI in academia represents one more progression in the abolition of logical thought, allowing misinformation, propaganda and personal biases to take the wheel of the populace’s heart.”

As we have witnessed over the past decade, an illiterate or subliterate body politic acts like a spooked herd and is a dangerously unstable foundation for a democracy. Instead of debating the merits of an issue, today we have been reduced to debating whether a story is true. Because the legacy media labeled so many things that turned out to be true “misinformation,” “disinformation,” “fake news,” or “a conspiracy theory,” Americans of all political stripes have turned on them. Instead of going to The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, ABC, Fox, CBS, CNN or NPR for news, an ever-growing segment of the U.S. population gets their news from Big Tech’s social media platforms: X, Truth Social, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook. As a result, the power of censorship has shifted from the U.S. government to the unaccountable titans of Silicon Valley. If nothing else, the Twitter Files showed that Big Tech and the U.S. government colluded to silence voices and opinions they considered problematic, even when they were true: Hunter Biden’s laptop, COVID origins, the risks of “Gender Affirming Care,” NSA surveillance, Big Tech’s abuse of users’ data/privacy (Cambridge Analytica), the war in Ukraine and many other hot button issues.

While the Tech Mongols are always careful to pay lip service to the democrat or republican platitudes that rule the day, beneath the Patagonia sweater vests and open collars lurks the most predatory, passive-aggressive, monopoly capitalists in human history. Irrespective of whatever personal political views they hold, I simply do not trust the unelected owners of private companies—Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Carp, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Ackman and many others—to be the arbiters of free speech and intellectual discourse in twenty-first century America. Their record of dishonesty and deception speaks for itself.

For those like me who dissent from the non-oppositional ideology du jour, the price is high. Since I founded Fainting Robin Foundation, I have been hacked and deplatformed by Meta, sued for a copyright violation for using my own photograph on the Fainting Robin website, and personally sued for defamation/slander. While I prevailed in the two lawsuits, Meta, who accused me of posting “sexually inappropriate photographs of minors” on Facebook and Instagram, has yet to respond to my lawyer’s registered letters to their chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead.

Facebook Legal Department, 156 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301

Re: Malicious Hack and Suspension of Dr. Peter Maguire’s Facebook/Instagram Accounts, and Facebook’s Defamatory Accusations

November 7, 2022

Dear Ms. Newstead:

I represent Dr. Peter Maguire, a New York Times bestselling author, professor and chairman of the Fainting Robin Foundation. Dr. Maguire has thousands of followers on his Facebook pages (Thai Stick Book, Fainting Robin Foundation and Peter Maguire) and Instagram account (Thai Stick Book). As he describes in his own statement, included herewith, Dr. Maguire had his identity stolen by hackers who posted illegal content on his Facebook pages and then attempt to use his credit card that was on file with Facebook to purchase Facebook ads.

In June 2022, Facebook first suspended his pages for posting “sexually inappropriate pictures of minors.” It was only after he contacted a friend with connections at Facebook and some extraordinary efforts that he was cleared and his pages were restored. Even after this obvious hack, Facebook made no remedial measures to prevent the same thing from happening again. In August 2022, all of his Facebook pages and now his Instagram account were hacked again and his pages were again suspended for posting “sexually inappropriate pictures of minors.” Not only did Facebook ignore Dr. Maguire’s pleas for an investigation, they made it impossible for him to challenge these suspensions. All of his accounts remain suspended to this day because Facebook maintains my client violated Facebook’s community standards by posting “sexually inappropriate images of minors.”

Dr. Maguire was compelled to seek legal help because Facebook/Meta is again ignoring his complaints about the second hack and suspension, likely by the same hackers using the same “back-door” that they used the first time. Dr. Maguire has used Facebook and Instagram to promote his books, nonprofit foundation, and media appearances for many years. Being banned from these platforms for criminal breaches of his Facebook and Instagram accounts by hackers defames his reputation and character and causes damage to his brand and intellectual property.

Please contact me at XXX-XXX-XXXX to discuss immediately reinstating Dr. Maguire’s Facebook pages and to discuss how Facebook/Meta will repair the damage that has been done, preventing this from happening again, and identifying and prosecuting the perpetrators.”

Sincerely,

/s/ Kristian Karl Larsen, Esq.”

Not only did Jennifer Newstead help draft the Patriot Act and serve in the Bush and Trump administrations, but she acted as what Bush administration Assistant Attorney General and torture advocate, John Yoo, described as the “day-to-day manager of the Patriot Act in Congress.” Lest we forget that the Patriot Act authorized the U.S government to spy on American citizens like myself. Section 215 gave the U.S. government the power to force companies to turn over data about “persons of interest” and authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to gather phone records from customers at companies like Verizon. Section 206 gave the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court the power to authorize the government to surveil phones and computers. According to Department of Justice whistleblowers, Facebook was reporting private messages and the data of American citizens to the FBI for expressing what they define as “anti-government” or “anti-authority sentiments.” According to Meta’s own records, between January and June of 2022, Facebook received 69,363 government requests for data and delivered it to the U.S. government 87.97% of the time.

The only thing that will bring Big Tech to its knees is the impending and inevitable cyber crisis. Soon the AI Frankenstein will escape from the lab, and hopefully, the world will survive. Albert Einstein put it best, “It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

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Peter Maguire – For those like me who dissent from the non-oppositional ideology du jour, the price is high. Since I founded Fainting Robin Foundation, I have been hacked and deplatformed by Meta, sued for a copyright violation for using my own photograph on the Fainting Robin website, and personally sued for defamation/slander. While I prevailed in the two lawsuits, Meta, that accused me of posting “sexually inappropriate photographs of minors” on Facebook and Instagram, has yet to respond to my lawyer’s registered letters to their chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead.

Go to Original – petermaguire.substack.com

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