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It is wrong to destroy these books.
Not because Anthropic is slurping all of human knowledge into the evil black obelisk so as to enact the "the [sic] came for CD/DVD. they are coming for our guns" future. No it's evil for a much more obviously reason: it is unnecessary destruction.
They are being forced to do so by an evil cartel that conspired to give itself an unnatural monopoly over thoughts and ideas.
This process does not have to be destructive except for the fact that if it was not, some people unseen in this picture could not continue their rent seeking unmolested. They're the real evil masterminds here. But since they are our established evil overlords and not some unsympathetic newcomer, they somehow get to not bear the responsibility of destroying knowledge in the name of saving it. Even through it is all done at their behest, at the point of the sword.
And this isn't an isolated example. How many cherished stories, songs and other cultural artifacts are stuck in legal limbo, barred from existence by laws that purport to protect them? NOLF, The Grey Album, Prince's vault, Nosferatu... There's a reason AI labs had to turn to pirates to gather their datasets, and it's that only pirates are actually serious about the conservation of human knowledge at this point. I'll go as far as to make the claim that, since its inception, copyright has destroyed more of human endeavor than it has created.
Well said.
It was frustrating seeing headlines blaming Anthropic for destroying rare books, when it was the incentives around copyright law that made it more cost effective and efficient to do it this way.
Heck, I'm usually more okay with patent law than copyright law, but there's even a patent angle to this story. OP's post mentioned:
But here's the thing, if Google had just given the patents away in this case, Anthropic could have made some of these non-destructive scanners and done the same thing. Because Google decided to sit on this technology instead, Anthropic's hands were further tied, and they did what was cheap and easy instead.
While my first impulse is to sympathize with the general sentiment of your post i have to disagree with the conclusion. Anthropic's hands were not "tied" nobody forced them to act as the did. They chose the path they did because it was convenient and economical. and that is something they will have to live with because thier souls are in thier keeping alone.
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