Related: Aaron Swartz (RSS, Creative Commons, Reddit, Markdown) was charged with unauthorized computer access and pirating copyrighted academic articles.

They threw the book at him. He was charged and faced a maximum of 50 years in prison.

OpenAI committed very similar crimes on a much larger scale, yet the most they will see is civil litigation.

Insiders have called it the largest theft of labor ever in history[1].

In the USA, corporations enjoy constitutional protections, the right to free speech etc, yet they are rarely if ever charged with crimes. For examples, see how the courts handle:

* large scale systematic wage theft by corporations vs petty theft by an individual,

* negligence infecting a 10k Americans with HIV by selling known-to-be-contaminated blood products (Bayer)

1. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/microsoft-exec-c...

>They threw the book at him. He was charged and faced a maximum of 50 years in prison.

But they offered him 4 months in a plea deal? You could argue they "threw the book at him" when he tried to take this to trial, but it's misleading to claim they did so initially.