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>Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penal
by gruez 2mo ago
>Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it.
This seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of argument. If Anthropic was pro-piracy I can imagine everyone getting mad that they're flouting law and want to "steal from artists" or whatever.
>and continue doing it
Source? AFAIK they were caught and stopped. That's why there was the recent story about how they were destroying old books to scan them.
- sam_lowry_ 2mo ago[flagged]
- empiricus 2mo agodid not follow all the details, but my understanding is that some form of copyright law nudges in the direction of destroy after scan?
- yonran 2mo ago> This is an unethical as a company may behave, short of killing people. This is hysterical. No, format shifting old unwanted books is not unethical. The books still exist, in an internal digital library. If copyright law were to change to allow sharing orphan works some day, Anthropic could share them. But under current law, the books are preserved digitally and used for transformative uses that all Claude users benefit from.
- bix6 2mo ago> From the start, Anthropic “ha[d] many places from which” it could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them to avoid “legal/practice/business slog,” as cofounder and chief executive officer Dario Amodei put it (see Opp. Exh. 27). https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz-v-Anthropic-Order-on-Fair-Use-6-23-25.pdf https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz... Sounds pretty pro piracy to me.
- wolvoleo 2mo agoThey stopped because they already had everything in their model anyway.
- austhrow743 2mo agoYes there are people who are both for and against copyright.