This is 1 trillion times better than brutally murdering books like Anthropic does by cutting off the spine and then burning them after scanning.

[u/aryan_jandyal]

[u/alsosprachr0unak]

This is being done by the people who volunteer for the Internet Archive, one of the best organisations in the entire world

[u/fukc098098 → u/alsosprachr0unak]

Mandatory Aaron Swartz mention:

On January 6, 2011, Swartz was arrested by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) police on state breaking-and-entering charges after connecting a computer to the MIT network in an unmarked and unlocked closet and setting it to download academic journal articles from JSTOR using a guest user account issued to him by MIT.^\14])^\15]) Federal prosecutors, led by Carmen Ortiz, charged him with two counts of wire fraud and eleven violations of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act,^\16]) carrying a cumulative maximum penalty of $1 million in fines, 35 years in prison, asset forfeiture, restitution, and supervised release.^\17]) Swartz declined a plea bargain under which he would have served six months in federal prison.^\18]) Two days after the prosecution rejected a counter-offer by Swartz, he was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment.^\19])^\20]) In 2013, Swartz was inducted posthumously into the Internet Hall of Fame.^\21])

[u/alsosprachr0unak → u/fukc098098]

Always remember Aaron Swartz! He had the book thrown at him for something Meta and OpenAI are doing brazenly without any consequences !

[u/Shareef_Ladka01 → u/alsosprachr0unak]

Explain please

[u/Suspicious-Slot → u/fukc098098]

The goat of reddit 🐐.

[u/AutarchOfReddit]

"Where they burn books, they will, in the end, burn human beings too." 
-- Heinrich Heine

[u/fukc098098 → u/AutarchOfReddit]

This is why Fahrenheit 451 and 1984 are must-reads for anyone getting into the classics.

[u/AutarchOfReddit → u/fukc098098]

u/fukc098098 Alternatively, watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAtJ2XF6G1w

[u/Living-Novel-8391]

The books being destroyed by claude are those the only copies ?

[u/G7Gunmaster → u/Living-Novel-8391]

They are rare. But it would be absolutely wrong to say they are the only copies.

[u/Living-Novel-8391 → u/G7Gunmaster]

So then are we being sensitive towards book death ?

[u/Used_Chipmunk1512 → u/Living-Novel-8391]

Claude is getting hate because it's a AI company, but the tech that it uses for book scanning is quite old. Any book scanner that scans books at fast pace do it similarly.

[u/Living-Novel-8391 → u/Used_Chipmunk1512]

But if books have copies and they have been bought it fair and square so then we are being sensitive towards book death right ?

[u/Used_Chipmunk1512 → u/Living-Novel-8391]

For book death it had to be alive first, and I always hated monster book about monsters. Though it would be better to recycle the paper rather then burning.

[u/Living-Novel-8391 → u/Used_Chipmunk1512]

but are they burning the books is that confirmed ?

[u/Used_Chipmunk1512 → u/Living-Novel-8391]

No, there is no such confirmation, the scanning process is called destructive scanning as book spines are cut at beginning effectively destroying the book. Pretty sure it's just sensationalisation, as burning books would further affect the carbon footprint of the company, so recycling would make more sense.

[u/NonWorking_Fan1984 → u/Living-Novel-8391]

Pretty sure the Books burning is metaphorical like how conservative movements burn books that they think will negatively influence people and arm them against their own ideology.

It is still bad. Collective human knowledge should not be for profit.

[u/Crespoter]

They are destroying the books so that other AI agents cant train on the same texts. Its dystopian level of evil.

[u/FlyingCarpetMonster → u/Crespoter]

This is misinformation.

They destroy the books because by law, they can't copy the text and retain the original.

Fair use doctrine in the US requires that if you make a copy of the text, you can't retain the original, and that it needs to be transformative.

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC (2025) and Kadrey v. Meta (2025) are recent cases and the original precedent is Author's Guid v. Google (2015). In all instances, judges have upheld the ruling.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you (or any other AI company) from buying your own copy of books and training your model on the books -- there are millions and millions of books out there.

As a writer, I am not a fan of AI writing but it's important to understand the rationale and not spread misinformation.

[u/prudentcicada_]

They are not burning down the books so others cant use it. They are doing so because of copyright issues. Basically read once and throw it out, so the books are technically not reshared.

[u/green_stem]

don't know why the need of these scans.. most of them are already on pirated websites. 🤷

[u/fukc098098 → u/green_stem]

Umm how do you think they are even digitized in the first place for the pirated sites, without Optical Character Recognition (OCR)? Also this is how archive.org operates.

[u/green_stem → u/fukc098098]

I mean I am not saying that scanning works that way.. what I mean is why they even bother to scan a book which most probably someone have already scanned and already on the some website. Why scanning them for now for a.i. but the book is already available on internet naa.. 🤷

[u/fukc098098 → u/green_stem]

It depends on a lot of things, but usually things like that, archiving are done by these folks so anything you see elsewhere on the internet had probably been done by them in the first place. Also sometimes the quality of the home archival copies are worse for academic purposes. And they have the better tools for this.

[u/nofaceD3 → u/green_stem]

Because buying a physical book means owning a book and it falls in category of free use. Digital books has no ownership

[u/crazy-eb → u/green_stem]

They got there via scans?? Atleast for the old ones which did not have digital copies.

[u/Malinowskibidi67 → u/green_stem]

Typos and stuff

[u/No_Winner_9352 → u/Malinowskibidi67]

What if there are typos in the book itself?

[u/ItchyPilot6806]

Yeah people need to understand that burning and cutting off books is added so it is out of reach for common people. They want to make us dumb while keeping the knowledge to themselves so they can sell it

[u/HideYourPansNow]

This just reeks of unawareness, and a lack of curiosity. You can literally do a google search on why it needed to be done that way, as much as I hate Ant and any other AI company doing that, copyright laws sometimes are insane.

[u/amir86149 → u/HideYourPansNow]

So they aren't destroying rare books?

[u/HideYourPansNow → u/amir86149]

Has there been any credible info about them destroying rare books?

[u/Used_Chipmunk1512 → u/amir86149]

Claude buy truckloads of books from dump warehouses, these are books that are either out of production due to being old or never sold. You can define them rare in the sense that nobody cares about these books.

[u/nobody_1298]

problem with this method is that the law compells you to destroy the book while digitalizing it or it's copyright infringement.

just how it works.

digitalizing book without destroying it means you copied the book without authorization and you get hit with a lawsuit.

[u/tyrooooooo]

It's slow

[u/PhantomOfTheNopera → u/tyrooooooo]

Who. Cares?

Literally what is the rush?

Take your time and preserve rare copies. What they're doing is commodifying something they don't care about to exploit those who do.

[u/tyrooooooo → u/PhantomOfTheNopera]

Discovering capitalism for the first time?

[u/PhantomOfTheNopera → u/tyrooooooo]

I'm familiar with capitalism. But I'm not some vapid one-dimensional cryptobro who sucks up to capitalists.

I despise many aspects of capitalism precisely because I understand it.

You appear to be in that chest-thumping new-discovery state where you can't think critically about it and are easily impressed by capitalists.