The Feather Thief
On a cool June evening in 2009, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist grabbed hundreds of bird skins - some collected 150 years earlier - and escaped into the darkness. Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was consumed by the strange case of the feather thief. What would possess a person to steal dead birds? This is the gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice.
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What Hacker News says
- "The Feather Thief" by Kirk Wallace Johnson is the book that piece is about. It's a much more thrilling and fascinating read than you might expect. Absolutely worth a read/listen!
- It's right here - you can't see it due to being downvoted.
I asked Claude to research this one and it turned up an interesting point. Pirated books got into the Pile and Anthropic paid 3k per book. Worth noting if anyone still uses the Pile.
[Claude researched, not verified]
In October 2020, developer Shawn Presser converted the Bibliotik pirate tracker into Books3 (196,640 books) and hosted it on The Eye, aiming to give everyone what OpenAI had with its secret Books1 and Books2. EleutherAI then folded Books3 into The Pile, distributed via Hugging Face and GitHub, and it went on to train Meta's LLaMA, EleutherAI's Pythia, and BloombergGPT. In August 2023, Alex Reisner of The Atlantic exposed its contents, and Maria Fredenslund's Danish Rights Alliance forced takedowns at The Eye, Hugging Face, and EleutherAI. A year later, Andrea Bartz (The Lost Night), Charles Graeber (The Good Nurse), and Kirk Wallace Johnson (The Feather Thief) filed Bartz v. Anthropic before Judge William Alsup, accusing Anthropic of using Books3, LibGen, and PiLiMi to train Claude; the case settled for $1.5 billion, about $3,000 per work.
- The lengths wealthy people go to outdo one another are just absurd. I heard a segment on the radio about the Atlantic salmon fly-tying community, who tie based on historic patterns that used ever rarer bird feathers.
Modern tiers are faced with a choice now that the birds that were rare then have become even rarer (or extinct): Tie with something else, or find a source of authentic feathers.
The segment was an interview with the author of The Feather Thief[0], who investigated the lengths one "enterprising" tier went to to acquire authentic feathers, destroying the historical scientific record for whole species in the process.
It seems insane that a fad of rich men from a long time ago becomes the obsession of a subculture of the larger fly tying community and that the result of that is a hole in the scientific record. It's enough to make you wish that folks would get obsessed with growing rare pineapples instead.
[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44153387-the-feather-thi...
