>Anthropic paying $1.5 billion in fines for downloading Anna's Archive established a moat. They want it to be illegal to pirate books: they can afford the penalties and continue doing it.

This seems like a "heads I win, tails you lose" type of argument. If Anthropic was pro-piracy I can imagine everyone getting mad that they're flouting law and want to "steal from artists" or whatever.

>and continue doing it

Source? AFAIK they were caught and stopped. That's why there was the recent story about how they were destroying old books to scan them.

▲

bix6 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

> From the start, Anthropic “ha[d] many places from which” it could have purchased books, but it preferred to steal them to avoid “legal/practice/business slog,” as cofounder and chief executive officer Dario Amodei put it (see Opp. Exh. 27).

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bartz...

Sounds pretty pro piracy to me.

▲

wolvoleo 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They stopped because they already had everything in their model anyway.

▲

austhrow743 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes there are people who are both for and against copyright.

▲

sam_lowry_ 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

	▲	yonran 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> This is an unethical as a company may behave, short of killing people. This is hysterical. No, format shifting old unwanted books is not unethical. The books still exist, in an internal digital library. If copyright law were to change to allow sharing orphan works some day, Anthropic could share them. But under current law, the books are preserved digitally and used for transformative uses that all Claude users benefit from.
	▲	empiricus 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		did not follow all the details, but my understanding is that some form of copyright law nudges in the direction of destroy after scan?