Claude AI Agrees to Pay Over a Billion For Pirating

The first AI legal settlement is a win for authors and creatives

Pirate on ship in storm, public domain photo from Stockcake

I once built a website for a deep-sea diver who took people to the bottom of the ocean to explore sunken ships, looking for treasure. He’d send me photos of shipwrecks and treasures found, and glowing letters from people who’d gone on a dive with him, and wow, it was fun writing those stories.

Everyone hopes to find a pirate ship he said, and I laughed because we sure do love pirate stories. Pirates of the Caribbean and Blackbeard with slow-burning dynamite stuck in his beard so he’d scare the wits out of people. Legends of buried treasure, and ships flying the skull and crossbones.

You know why I’m telling you this, right?

Historians say if we want to understand today, we need to know history, and here’s something most people don’t know about pirates. Many of them didn’t start out as pirates. They started out as privateers.

Know what a privateer is? It’s permission to steal in a time of war.

A ship owner could buy a “letter of marque,” which was legal permission to attack ships and take their cargo. The cargo was sold off, and the proceeds split between the government, the privateer and the ship’s crew.