> 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).

infinite_spin 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021)

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.

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ACCount37 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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sidewndr46 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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?

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eru 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There might be special rules around DRM that go beyond normal copyright?

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jdub an hour ago | parent [-]

Ladies and gentlemen, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

(which is terrible, but I would be delighted if they breached it and got thoroughly spanked)

	▲	sidewndr46 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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 ?

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streetfighter64 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?

	▲	sidewndr46 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		breaking DRM is so easy my generation was doing it as kids, there is no technical obstacle there.

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tokai 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Non of those are rare. All a available in libraries for ILL.