Bad enough to steal IP but destroying books…that’s just evil

So is it moral of me to destroy a copy of "Windows 95 for Dummies"?

What if a person with small children and an elderly, incontinent pet with a penchant for peeing on books wants to buy it - can I sell this book to such a dangerous purchaser who might destroy it?

I love book as much as the next person but the hyperbole about "rare books" is absurd. Nobody is buying the Gutenburg Bible and destroying it for AI. The books in question are certainly not rare enough to be in museums - without titles there's no proof these are anything of real value.

To me, the hate against "destroying books" is kinda silly. The reason we're against destroying books is because the Nazis did it to destroy information.

This situation has absolutely no relation to that. This is the exact opposite, and the only reason this information isn't available publicly and is in risk of getting lost is copyright law.

TLDR: Amazon isn't the nazis in this story, copyright law is.

But rich people want to violate copyright now! So judges ruled that it's now legal. But, because "the law is the same for everyone" they needed some excuse. NOT because, you know, obviously this demonstrates that very rich companies get to violate the law and you get hit by $30000 per infraction when you do it, when Anthropic ... doesn't even have to stop violating copyright when they do it.

Anyway ... this case is:

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, No. 3:24-cv-05417-WHA, U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, decided by Judge William Alsup

“the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement not redistributed, this was a fair use.”

https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...

Obviously this violates precedent, I had an internal LLM (probably a frontend for Claude or ChatGPT) find them (just like the convictions for file sharing in the 2000s required counter-to-the-law reasoning by judges, fair use was almost never accepted as a valid excuse, even when it obviously was, but of course Sony was a billion dollar company and needed to be in the right. In fact that this had to happen was explicitly given as a reason to create the DMCA)

Anyway, some precedents:

Hotaling v. Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 118 F.3d 199 (4th Cir. 1997)

“Although the Church acknowledges that its sole remaining copy is not the one it originally acquired … it maintains that the remaining copy does not infringe Hotaling's copyright because it is a replacement copy…”

(this reasoning was rejected by the court)

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F3/118...

Atari, Inc. v. JS & A Group, Inc., 597 F. Supp. 5 (N.D. Ill. 1983)

... defendant sold a device for making backup copies of copyrighted Atari cartridges and argued that §117 permitted replacement/archival copying. The court rejected the broad replacement theory.

https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/FSupp/5...

This very court has clearly declared that making a copy of a copyrighted work for replacement purposes is illegal, on multiple occasions.

I would like to point out that this isn't Anthropic's only extreme-WTF law violation. When the original judgement against them was made against them, they were forced to admit that using books to train models was illegal if acquired illegally AND THEN WERE ALLOWED TO KEEP DOING IT (thankfully the court never mentioned that part in the judgement so at least they can claim that was never decided when it becomes a huge problem in future cases as it obviously will). But that's not how this works. In my opinion Anthropic and OpenAI and everyone else need to at minimum take training material that was acquired in violation of copyright out of their training data unless and until they have a separate licensing agreement with the copyright holders. As long as Claude knows more about Harry Potter than is said in the promotional summaries it is obviously in violation.

Because of the copyright-filesharing court wars of the 2000s, which were also handled dishonestly by courts (whether we're talking US or EU courts), and the absurd copyright extensions, they had to now make some new excuse, and settled on this very sad, very destructive option. It's not even defensible legally, imho, but of course the biggest wallet must win. I don't understand. It's such a sad joke at this point, and it's not like the courts even still had credibility after the file sharing cases.

I wonder which sad excuse will be forthcoming from the courts when we have someone release a movie made by an AI model that is obviously a direct ripoff from some high-budget studio movie, and Disney needs to be protected from ... say ... "Scorched: Brothers of Aridelle" — In a vast desert kingdom, the royal brothers Elias and Anders grow up together, but Elias secretly possesses dangerous fire magic and isolates himself after accidentally hurting Anders as a child; years later, at Elias’s coronation, Anders announces his engagement to the seemingly charming Princess Hanna, provoking an argument that exposes Elias’s powers and sends him fleeing into the dunes, where he accidentally unleashes an endless heatwave that dries the kingdom’s wells and turns the capital into a furnace ...