{"id":307096,"date":"2025-11-10T12:00:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=307096"},"modified":"2025-11-10T12:55:37","modified_gmt":"2025-11-10T12:55:37","slug":"the-tech-mongols-and-the-great-heist-of-intellectual-property","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/11\/the-tech-mongols-and-the-great-heist-of-intellectual-property\/","title":{"rendered":"The Tech Mongols and the Great Heist of Intellectual Property"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Mark Zuckerberg. Photo: bridesandyou.com<\/p><\/div>\n

Monopoly Capitalism and the Destruction of Intellectual Culture<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

6 Nov 2025\u00a0<\/em>–\u00a0After 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\u2019s 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 \u201ctrain\u201d their AI engines to produce decent \u201ccontent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The time is long overdue that we replace the word \u201ctrain\u201d with \u201csteal\u201d and \u201ccontent\u201d with \u201cintellectual property\u201d because after AI ingests any and all IP, they own it. As the great legal scholar William Blackstone pointed out, \u201cThe law holds possession to be a great reason in favor of the possessor, and will favor such possession against any other title.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMeta, 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,\u201d wrote investigative journalist Lee Fang. \u201cThe 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

I am now a party in the class action lawsuit Bartz v. Anthropic PBC.<\/strong><\/em> Three of my books\u2014Law and War<\/em>, Facing Death in Cambodia<\/em>, and Thai Stick<\/em>\u2014are among the 500,000 copywritten publications stolen by the AI company Anthropic \u201cto train\u201d for their latest, greatest AI creation, \u201cClaude.\u201d My copywritten books, all published by Columbia University Press, were just a fraction of the seven million pirated \u201ctexts\u201d (books, articles, online writing) that Anthropic fed their AI beast.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

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<\/em> case, expressed his doubts about the proposed settlement. \u201cThis deal feels like it could be \u2018forced down the throat\u2019 of authors,\u201d Alsup wrote, \u201cand I am uneasy about whether a fair share of the funds will actually reach writers.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC <\/em>is hardly an isolated case. Kadrey et al. v. Meta Platforms<\/em> showed that Meta stole pirated books (Library Genesis) from Russian servers to feed their latest, greatest, AI beast. \u201cThe litigation produced emails and documents showing Meta employees admitting that \u2018torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn\u2019t feel right \ud83d\ude03,\u2019\u201d wrote Lee Fang. \u201cIn one exchange, engineers noted that use of the illegal content had been escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as \u2018MZ\u2019) and that the decision was \u2018approved to use.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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To the victor go the spoils. Mark Zuckerberg enjoying the fruits of his plunder.
\nPhoto: AOHAN\/MEGA<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/a> (501c3) in 2018. In my original mission statement, I wrote: \u201cOver the last fifteen years, support for independent scholarship outside an increasingly narrow mainstream has vanished. \u2018Publish or perish\u2019 has devolved into \u2018publish and perish\u2019 because most academic presses, magazines, and online publications pay, at best, NAFTA inspired wages for writing, photography, and fine art\u2014the \u2018content\u2019\u2014that 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 \u2018free rider monopoly platforms\u2019 like Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon. As Jonathan Taplin put it in The New York Times<\/em>, \u2018The rise of the digital giants is directly connected to the fall of the creative industries in our country.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The issues I outlined in that original mission statement\u2014the death of independent journalism, the failure of American education and Big Tech\u2019s assault on the creative professions\u2014have now grown into societal problems that are undermining America\u2019s 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 \u201cAmerica\u2019s Report Card,\u201d scored the lowest in the survey\u2019s history. Only 35% of high school seniors could read proficiently and 22% could do grade level math. According to the NAEA, our nation faces \u201ca significant educational crisis.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cstudent success\u201d 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. \u201cAI has infected higher education like a deathwatch beetle, hollowing out sound structures from the inside until the imminent collapse,\u201d wrote English professor Mark Massaro. \u201cThe 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\u2019s heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

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 \u201cmisinformation,\u201d \u201cdisinformation,\u201d \u201cfake news,\u201d or \u201ca conspiracy theory,\u201d Americans of all political stripes have turned on them. Instead of going to The New York Times<\/em>, Washington Post<\/em>, Wall Street Journal, ABC, Fox, CBS, CNN <\/em>or NPR <\/em>for news, an ever-growing segment of the U.S. population gets their news from Big Tech\u2019s 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\u2019s laptop, COVID origins, the risks of \u201cGender Affirming Care,\u201d NSA surveillance, Big Tech\u2019s abuse of users\u2019 data\/privacy (Cambridge Analytica), the war in Ukraine and many other hot button issues.<\/p>\n

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\u2014Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Alex Carp, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos, Bill Ackman and many others\u2014to be the arbiters of free speech and intellectual discourse in twenty-first century America. Their record of dishonesty and deception speaks for itself.<\/p>\n

For those like me who dissent from the non-oppositional ideology du jour<\/em>, 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 \u201csexually inappropriate photographs of minors\u201d on Facebook and Instagram, has yet to respond to my lawyer\u2019s registered letters to their chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead.<\/p>\n

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Jennifer Newstead defending the Trump Administration in the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Photo: Jerry Lampen\/Getty Images.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Facebook Legal Department, 156 University Avenue, Palo Alto, CA 94301<\/em><\/p>\n

Re: Malicious Hack and Suspension of Dr. Peter Maguire\u2019s Facebook\/Instagram Accounts, and Facebook\u2019s Defamatory Accusations<\/em><\/p>\n

November 7, 2022<\/em><\/p>\n

Dear Ms. Newstead:<\/em><\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p>\n

In June 2022, Facebook first suspended his pages for posting \u201csexually inappropriate pictures of minors.\u201d 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 \u201csexually inappropriate pictures of minors.\u201d Not only did Facebook ignore Dr. Maguire\u2019s 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\u2019s community standards by posting \u201csexually inappropriate images of minors.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u201cback-door\u201d 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.<\/em><\/p>\n

Please contact me at XXX-XXX-XXXX to discuss immediately reinstating Dr. Maguire\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Sincerely,<\/em><\/p>\n

\/s\/ Kristian Karl Larsen, Esq.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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 \u201cday-to-day manager of the Patriot Act in Congress.\u201d 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 \u201cpersons of interest\u201d 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 \u201canti-government\u201d or \u201canti-authority sentiments.\u201d According to Meta\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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, \u201cIt has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a>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 \u201csexually inappropriate photographs of minors\u201d on Facebook and Instagram, has yet to respond to my lawyer\u2019s registered letters to their chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original – petermaguire.substack.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

6 Nov 2025\u00a0–\u00a0After the monopoly capitalists of Big Tech gained control of the US media (Skydance, Amazon, Google, AT&T, Comcast) and the channels of mass communication (X, YouTube, Meta, TikTok), it was only natural for them to plunder the world\u2019s intellectual property (IP). AI engines must ingest huge quantities of IP to produce decent \u201ccontent.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":307102,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3078],"tags":[2302,1733,1009,1007,462,2915,2689,3695,1006,2098,3116],"class_list":["post-307096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-amazon","tag-artificial-intelligence-ai","tag-big-tech","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-media-empire","tag-metaverse","tag-monopoly-capitalism","tag-social-media","tag-tiktok","tag-x"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=307096"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307105,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/307096\/revisions\/307105"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/307102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=307096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=307096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=307096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}