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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 27, 2026

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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:

By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned.

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.