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To skirt copyright law, Anthropic bought and destroyed millions of physical books to train its "Claude" LLM (arstechnica.com)

submitted 1 month ago by cypherpunks@lemmy.ml to c/nottheonion@lemmy.ml

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[–] koper@feddit.nl 13 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to "conserv[ing] space" through format conversion and found it transformative.

[–] ChicoSuave@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

It's literally the process that allows digitized media to be safe to possess. Someone read the FBI warnings before movies on VHS. This is some corporate malicious compliance and what the law looks like when taken to an absurd extreme.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Phrased like it's a technicality, when it's just... your rights. You are explicitly allowed to do this.

This whole article sounds like Jack Valenti shrieking over VCRs. 'They copied a broadcast! For later!!! That's skirting copyright law!'

Copyright law suuucks. It needs vicious reform. And yet! These specific things have always been permitted, as a necessary part of protecting consumers, versus an industry that would love to charge rent for the books on your shelf. Those motherfuckers put DRM in cables. And yet: their laws say this is fine.

[–] koper@feddit.nl 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It's not that clear cut. Buying a book doesn't generallly give you the right to make copies and sell those.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 0 points 1 month ago

Is that what they did?

Is that what anyone's talking about?