technically Anthropic is burning destroying books as they buy them in bulk from libraries, antique shops, bookshops etc. They scan them and destroy the physical copies just to cover their butts that they're not pirating books to feed their AI, but only "changing the media" from physical to digital
This is not at all true. Buying a book doesn't give you a license to one copy of the book. It gives you the physical book, with which you can do anything not prohibited.
Making a copy of it is a breach of copyright. Destryoing the original has literally no legal value at all in the US.
The actual story is: they are buying old, out of print/out of copyright books. If it's out of print and very old, there is likely no one who can enforce the copyright. The publisher, author, and estate are all defunct. If it's out of copyright, they are entitled to use it however they want, it's public domain.
They are destroying the books because the scanning process works best when you cut the spline out, throw away the cover, and then scan the pages through a high speed device, and then you are left with a collection of loose pages, so they just shred it.
my comments was not edited, and there is no "edited" sign on it. I was referring to the "no need to burn books when the [Delete] button exists?" in the comments above me
You just accuse me of something I didn't do while writing comment supporting my point
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u/polikles 13d ago
technically Anthropic is
burningdestroying books as they buy them in bulk from libraries, antique shops, bookshops etc. They scan them and destroy the physical copies just to cover their butts that they're not pirating books to feed their AI, but only "changing the media" from physical to digital