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Ask HN: How is AI destruction of books legal?

1•Madmallard•46m ago
I'm talking about Anthropic and other AI companies finding rare books, feeding their pages into the model training data, and then shredding the books afterward.

They are destroying history actively. It reminds me of religious people claiming these people really are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Surely this should be treated very harshly and stopped??? I don't want novels to disappear, especially rare ones?

Comments

deadeye•41m ago
Its private property. I don't like it either, but I wouldn't like intrusive laws either.
RALaBarge•41m ago
Did they purchase the books legally? Is their plan to destroy every copy of every book ever, and if it were, would that even be possible?
JohnFen•31m ago
I can destroy anything that I own. So can they. They're despicable for doing this, but there's nothing remotely illegal about it.

Not everything bad should be illegal, because sometimes outlawing a thing can have greater adverse consequences than the thing itself. Some things are better handled through social rejection.

toomuchtodo•8m ago
There is no law about destructively scanning your own books. If you would like to preserve a book, buy it and send it to the Internet Archive for non destructive scanning and long term physical archival. It's very easy to do so, as someone who sends them books.

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

https://help.archive.org/help/does-the-internet-archive-have...

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