> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
How is a book from 2021 considered rare in this context? There's almost certainly a digital copy of it in existence prior to Anthropic purchasing a print edition.
Niche text. It's not impossible that there was only ever under a thousand of them printed and released into circulation.
A digital copy would exist somewhere, of course. But for us, that only matters if we can buy or download it. And for AI companies, that only matters if they can get a digital copy DRM-free and licensed permissively enough.
This argument doesn't make any sense. All manner of AI companies just ingest whatever random text they can find on the internet to train their data, including copyrighted publications. Why would DRM on a digital copy of a book matter?
> Why would DRM on a digital copy of a book matter?
Because DRM is just a way to make "breaking copyright" more practically cumbersome. What's easier, breaking digital DRM for each and every E-book you find, or just establishing a single pipeline for scanning physical books?
Again, what's more technically feasible? Setting up a DRM-cracking LLM and manually verifying that it's actually succeeded for each and every DRM scheme you encounter, or just throwing the books in a regular old office scanner and being sure it works without even checking...
I would be delighted if AI companies got together and thoroughly dismantled DMCA.
That atrocity of a law was a blight upon digital freedom since the day it came to exist. DRM should never have been given any legal protection - and I would push for numerous forms of DRM to be outlawed instead.
so if I base64 encode my blog, have some Javascript that 'validates' an authorized viewer and then decodes the base64 into HTML which is added to the DOM does that constitute DRM ?
The DMCA doesn't care exactly how the authorization works, it only cares that it's needed.
Quote from Wikipedia[0] of DMCA section 103:
> No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.
> "circumvent a technological measure" means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and
> a technological measure "effectively controls access to a work" if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.
Rare or not, destroying books is in itself a morally repugnant act. I don't know man, it's not so long ago we used to view nazi book burnings as an archetype of evil. Today companies are offering book-burning-as-a-service and it hardly causes a stir.
Is it destruction or format shift? Technically the books still exist; just that they're now digital. There's no content loss (what I imagine comprises a "book") unless any digitization is then deleted.
