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Comment on AI Firms Are Buying Up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them

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"...Internal documents unsealed in legal filings in January revealed that Anthropic was acutely aware of how negatively such a project would be received outside the company.

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” ..."

Don't like it? Change copyright.

They do this because the law required it.

They ignored the same copyright laws in many other cases. Why do we believe they were abiding strictly by it this time?

What did the law require ?

And since when do AI companies care about copyright law ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

After the initial transfer of ownership of a legal copy of a copyrighted work, the first-sale doctrine eliminates the copyright holder's right to control ownership of that specific copy.

How does the first sale doctrine require these horrific companies to destroy the books?

As near as I can tell, there is no legal pressure for them to do that. They're destroying them because that's how their scanning machinery works.

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