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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

I don't like Anthropic, I think their "marketing through fear" approach to be shitty and frankly I'm over the AI "boom" anyway.

BUT... here's the only line in that whole article that really matters, because this is a headline meant to create an impression that isn't corrected for quite a while.

> The court documents don't indicate that any rare books were destroyed in this process—Anthropic purchased its books in bulk from major retailers

Books are routinely pulped and recycled, they aren't holy, and if they aren't rare then frankly who cares what techniques they use to scan them? The issue is whether or not "AI" learning represents fair use, which the courts so far have ruled that it does.

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> any rare books were destroyed in this proces

Does it matter? It's waste at the end of the day. Instead they could have bought e-books. Just because we can recycle paper, it doesn't mean we have the luxury to create waste as we see fit, esp. when climate change became this severe.

> which the courts so far have ruled that it does.

Any concrete cases you can cite?

From [0], for example, while the course said that the authors failed to argue their case, the second observation is complete opposite of what you said. Citing the article directly:

    Opinion suggests AI models do generally violate law.

In the same spirit, I think I can safely assume that they violated copyright law, since they earn money by circumventing it, and fair use doesn't like for-profit copying.

[0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/meta-beats-copyrigh...

TFA is based on the ruling which found that Anthropic training on these books was fair use.

> It's waste at the end of the day

Rubbish.

More likely they are taking a waste stream of books and reusing and possibly even recycling.

Few people want old books, and many people that have books are throwing them out or donating them. I don't think I know anybody under 30 with a bookshelf of books they obviously intend to keep for life. Bookshelves used to be an elite status symbol, now I often see them as image rather than reference (e.g. part off backdrop behind influencer vid).

It is likely they didn't destroy much of value, since they will have minimized their purchasing costs. Modern DRM is not helping.

They'd have to agree to special terms that go beyond the normal first sale doctrine. If those terms don't hold up their own terms against training on their model data for foundation models might not hold up, so you can see their perverse incentive to burn books.

> Does it matter?

As someone who finds the act objectionable, I actually do think this is an important point. Destroying commodity books in this way is objectionable. Destroying precious books in this way would be abominable.

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