A judge ruled that the proceedings would be held behind closed doors at the request of Russia's Central Bank, which sought to "protect banking secrecy."

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

At the Stone Skimming World Championships in Scotland (at an old slate quarry), it’s distance that counts, not the number of skips. “Anyone who is familiar with slate could instinctively tell you that it’s a particularly good rock for skimming.”

In een flatwoning aan Kievitlaan in Capelle aan den IJssel is vrijdagmiddag rond 14:45 uur een flinke brand uitgebroken. De vlammen sloegen uit de woning op de bovenste verdieping en er kwam veel rook vrij. Twee bewoners worden gecontroleerd door ambulancemedewerkers.

Robin van Persie is tijdens persconferenties voorafgaand aan wedstrijden vaak in voor een grapje. Vrijdag was dat anders. Bij Feyenoord overheerst het chagrijn. "Het zou misplaatst zijn om hier met een grote glimlach te zitten."

NEW YORK (ANP) - De aandelenbeurzen in New York zijn vrijdag licht hoger begonnen. Beleggers deden het rustig aan voorafgaand aan het lange weekend in de Verenigde Staten. Wall Street blijft maandag gesloten op Martin Luther King Day. Na de resultaten van de grote Amerikaanse banken deze week wordt het cijferseizoen volgende week voortgezet met cijfers van streamingdienst Netflix, consumentengoederenconcerns Johnson & Johnson en Procter & Gamble en chipbedrijf Intel.

De algehele stemming op Wall Street was voorzichtig positief na de winstbeurt een dag eerder. De Dow-Jonesindex noteerde kort na opening van de markt 0,3 procent hoger op 49.606 punten. De brede S&P 500-index klom 0,3 procent tot 6963 punten en techbeurs Nasdaq steeg 0,4 procent tot 23.624 punten.

De Amerikaanse beurzen sloten donderdag tot 0,6 procent hoger, mede dankzij beter dan verwachte resultaten van de grote zakenbanken Goldman Sachs en Morgan Stanley. Ook de chipbedrijven lieten stevige winsten zien dankzij goed ontvangen resultaten en vooruitzichten van de Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC.

Goldman Sachs en Morgan Stanley klommen nu tot 0,2 procent, na winsten van tot bijna 6 procent een dag eerder. Chipbedrijven als Nvidia en Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) wonnen 1,2 en 0,7 procent, na koerswinsten van 2 procent op donderdag. De fabrikanten van geheugenchips Micron Technology, Western Digital en Seagate Technology gingen verder omhoog en stegen tot 7 procent.

Beleggers verwerkten daarnaast de handelsdeal tussen de Verenigde Staten en Taiwan. Onder de deal dalen de importheffingen op goederen uit Taiwan en gaan Taiwanese bedrijven honderden miljarden investeren in chipproductie in de VS. China, dat Taiwan als een afvallige provincie beschouwt, zei fel gekant te zijn tegen de deal.

J.B. Hunt Transport Services zakte 1,7 procent. Het transportbedrijf boekte afgelopen kwartaal meer winst dan verwacht, maar de omzet viel wat tegen.

De olieprijzen wonnen meer dan 1 procent na de forse daling van ruim 4 procent een dag eerder. De vrees voor een Amerikaanse aanval op Iran nam af nadat president Donald Trump verklaarde dat het doden van demonstranten door het Iraanse regime volgens hem is gestopt. Trump dreigde eerder militair in te grijpen als er nog meer doden zouden vallen bij de massale protesten tegen het regime.

Beleggers hielden daarnaast de ontwikkelingen rond Groenland in de gaten. Meerdere Europese landen sturen militairen naar het tot het Deense koninkrijk behorende eiland, na aanhoudende claims van Trump dat Groenland Amerikaans moet worden.

In Transnistrië, afgescheiden van Moldavië, gebeurt niks, groeit niks en ontwikkelt niks, zag fotograaf Paul van der Stap. Maar de inwoners zorgen goed voor elkaar.

More than a decade after Aaron Swartz’s death, the United States is still living inside the contradiction that destroyed him.

Swartz believed that knowledge, especially publicly funded knowledge, should be freely accessible. Acting on that, he downloaded thousands of academic articles from the JSTOR archive with the intention of making them publicly available. For this, the federal government charged him with a felony and threatened decades in prison. After two years of prosecutorial pressure, Swartz died by suicide on Jan. 11, 2013.

The still-unresolved questions raised by his case have resurfaced in today’s debates over artificial intelligence, copyright and the ultimate control of knowledge.

At the time of Swartz’s prosecution, vast amounts of research were funded by taxpayers, conducted at public institutions and intended to advance public understanding. But access to that research was, and still is, locked behind expensive paywalls. People are unable to read work they helped fund without paying private journals and research websites.

Swartz considered this hoarding of knowledge to be neither accidental nor inevitable. It was the result of legal, economic and political choices. His actions challenged those choices directly. And for that, the government treated him as a criminal.

Today’s AI arms race involves a far more expansive, profit-driven form of information appropriation. The tech giants ingest vast amounts of copyrighted material: books, journalism, academic papers, art, music and personal writing. This data is scraped at industrial scale, often without consent, compensation or transparency, and then used to train large AI models.

AI companies then sell their proprietary systems, built on public and private knowledge, back to the people who funded it. But this time, the government’s response has been markedly different. There are no criminal prosecutions, no threats of decades-long prison sentences. Lawsuits proceed slowly, enforcement remains uncertain and policymakers signal caution, given AI’s perceived economic and strategic importance. Copyright infringement is reframed as an unfortunate but necessary step toward “innovation.”

Recent developments underscore this imbalance. In 2025, Anthropic reached a settlement with publishers over allegations that its AI systems were trained on copyrighted books without authorization. The agreement reportedly valued infringement at roughly $3,000 per book across an estimated 500,000 works, coming at a cost of over $1.5 billion. Plagiarism disputes between artists and accused infringers routinely settle for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars when prominent works are involved. Scholars estimate Anthropic avoided over $1 trillion in liability costs. For well-capitalized AI firms, such settlements are likely being factored as a predictable cost of doing business.

As AI becomes a larger part of America’s economy, one can see the writing on the wall. Judges will twist themselves into knots to justify an innovative technology premised on literally stealing the works of artists, poets, musicians, all of academia and the internet, and vast expanses of literature. But if Swartz’s actions were criminal, it is worth asking: What standard are we now applying to AI companies?

The question is not simply whether copyright law applies to AI. It is why the law appears to operate so differently depending on who is doing the extracting and for what purpose.

The stakes extend beyond copyright law or past injustices. They concern who controls the infrastructure of knowledge going forward and what that control means for democratic participation, accountability and public trust.

Systems trained on vast bodies of publicly funded research are increasingly becoming the primary way people learn about science, law, medicine and public policy. As search, synthesis and explanation are mediated through AI models, control over training data and infrastructure translates into control over what questions can be asked, what answers are surfaced, and whose expertise is treated as authoritative. If public knowledge is absorbed into proprietary systems that the public cannot inspect, audit or meaningfully challenge, then access to information is no longer governed by democratic norms but by corporate priorities.

Like the early internet, AI is often described as a democratizing force. But also like the internet, AI’s current trajectory suggests something closer to consolidation. Control over data, models and computational infrastructure is concentrated in the hands of a small number of powerful tech companies. They will decide who gets access to knowledge, under what conditions and at what price.

Swartz’s fight was not simply about access, but about whether knowledge should be governed by openness or corporate capture, and who that knowledge is ultimately for. He understood that access to knowledge is a prerequisite for democracy. A society cannot meaningfully debate policy, science or justice if information is locked away behind paywalls or controlled by proprietary algorithms. If we allow AI companies to profit from mass appropriation while claiming immunity, we are choosing a future in which access to knowledge is governed by corporate power rather than democratic values.

How we treat knowledge—who may access it, who may profit from it and who is punished for sharing it—has become a test of our democratic commitments. We should be honest about what those choices say about us.

This essay was written with J. B. Branch, and originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

That went well

Imagine changing your popular brand to capitalize on an emerging tech trend that never emerged. Mark Zuckerberg did just that, and now Meta is backing away from the virtual reality business in which it invested billions.…