this is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...

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rpdillon 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Wait: the entire premise of copyright is to prevent someone from publishing a book, and a competitor buys a copy, clones it, and sells copies way cheaper because they don't have to pay the author.

Now, in 2026, we're acting like cloning a published book is not technically feasible? That doesn't track. With publishing on-demand, it's easy to imagine a business with digital copies of all these works that they make available for print-on-demand.

The uncomfortable reality is that most of these books are nothing anyone cares about. Even the book sellers in the 404 story call them dead inventory.

Can we get some actual book titles into the discussion so we can focus on facts rather than speculation?

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alightsoul 19 hours ago | parent [-]

This is not a technical problem at all. This is a copyright problem. Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem until they had to pay 1.5 billion after they lost a copyright court case

Op means a lot of those books were made before computers were used for that purpose and the publishers and probably authors no longer exist, so there is no digital copy to just reprint, unless someone scans it themselves and publishes it, risking copyright violation when done at large scale due to possible exceptions to this rule

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rpdillon 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> publishers and probably authors no longer exist

Who is going to claim a copyright violation?

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Sha1rholder 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem

Did they? Then why did they "don't want anyone to know about this"? Or do you think their lawyers are dumb?

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dukeyukey 17 hours ago | parent [-]

I imagine they know the public would react like the public is reacting. Like obviously this is not worse than what libraries and thrift shops do daily, but it is bad optics.

	▲	Sha1rholder 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I don't think so. Libraries and thrift shops usually don't consider it a good idea to damage those precious, hard-to-reprint books. None would say anything if Anthropic only destroyed 1 million Harry Potter or Foundations

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footydude 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...

Most developed countries have a 'legal deposit' system with a national archive/national library that requires publishers to send a copy of their works to them. They've existed in some form for centuries in some countries.

Example for the UK - British Library guidance: https://www.bl.uk/services/legal-deposit

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Ekaros 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Many of them don't have current publisher because no one wants to buy them. I would bet that vast majority of these books have no commercial market.