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From their perspective, it's training data that their competitors don't have. If they make it available, they fill in their moat.
by mbeavitt 1mo ago
From their perspective, it's training data that their competitors don't have. If they make it available, they fill in their moat.
- silverwind 1mo agoMore importantly: Once Anthropic is gone, all knowlege is lost.
- psma_egeliaa 1mo agoIt will probably be actioned off in the bankruptcy proceedings.
- jonhohle 1mo agoThat’s an interesting angle. There’s probably some property value (though maybe not enough based on volume) to the books they purchased. I doubt there’s any value to the “backups” of those books. I’d imagine they’re normally transferable.
- wildzzz 1mo agoThey cut the bindings off and feed loose leaf books through a document scanner. It would be difficult to store and probably unsellable, it's probably going in the trash. To legally retain these scans, you must own the original book. You can sell or give away the original book (sans binding) but it's legally dubious as to whether the scan can be transferred along with it. So if Anthropic has no interest in storing thousands of loose leaf books, they are likely destroying both the original and scan as soon as possible. At the end of the day, the only thing of value Anthropic has is the trained model which is definitely transferable.
- merely-unlikely 1mo agoIt's already been distilled.
- flatline 1mo agoThey cannot scan the books then resell them or donate them under current US copyright law. It’s not clear to me that they could warehouse them if they wanted. In the recent Bartz v Anthropic case the judge ruled this destruction as legal, saying > The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal digital copy of a work but then you cannot resell the hard copy and keep the digital one. Same principle applies here.
- jdiff 1mo agoNowhere in this description did it require destruction of the physical book. This is being done because it's easier to scan a shucked book, and this explanation is circulating because it's easier to blame it on the law and that pesky meddling government.
- fc417fc802 1mo agoSo if I scan a book, sell it, and keep using the scan, is that legal? (Spoiler: That's not legal. It's a violation of IP law.)
- jdiff 1mo agoSelling it is not allowed. The inability to sell it does not require its destruction.
- inigyou 1mo agoBut copyright law does, because otherwise you have two copies. This isn't theoretical, AI companies have finished lawsuits about this and this was the ruling.
- jdiff 1mo agoThe ruling was that what they did was within the law, not required by law in every detail. They cannot resell the copies. I saw nothing in that ruling that required their destruction, because it is not required. A person can digitize their own books without destroying the original. So can Anthropic. They are choosing to destroy the books for easier scanning and trying to palm off the blame for it.
- JKCalhoun 1mo agoI love how sci-fi authors like Ray Bradbury toyed around with a similar issue but then got it so wildly wrong.