A critical distinction, because they were going to to find terabytes of not pirated books to train on that contained the sum history of humanities knowledge /s
> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books
This is worse than pirating books to an absurd degree, it's almost a parody - the company that slurps all human knowledge ends up not only metaphorically, but also physically destroying those books, like an information vampire.
Authors don't even receive any financial compensation if the books were bought second hand, either. There's no benefit in doing that. (Not that making one final sale of a hardcover copy would make any difference though)
If Anthropic were at least buying ebooks, this insanity wouldn't need to happen. Unfortunately there is no bulk rates for buying millions of ebooks like you have in the used book market
There's such a thing as fair use and digitizing privately owned printed material is absolutely legal... including for corporations.
There is less publicly available knowledge now on the Internet than there has been 3 years ago.
That would be pirating. So your complaint is that they didn't do more piracy?
To be clear, this isn't a problem with the court process. Everything here appears perfectly in accordance with the law. It's just an absurd state to be in.
the people operating frontier labs are bad people they cannot be trusted in any way
the best solution to them would be to send them to monster island (even though it's really a peninsula)
But if you don't want to ban them, telling them to buy one book of each, likely second hand, is complete pettiness that resulted in destructive scanning of millions of books, many of which were already practically available in digital form.
That's because the judges are supposed to rule on questions of law (ie. "is AI training fair use?"), not whether they think AI's good or not.