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?
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
> publishers and probably authors no longer exist
Who is going to claim a copyright violation?
> 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?
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.
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