8 ms·
Why destroy, though?
by nothrowaways 19d ago
Why destroy, though?
- Madmallard 19d agoBecause they're literally the devil
- carefulfungi 19d agohttps://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...
- tptacek 19d agoBecause they're legally required to.
- schoen 19d agoThis claim was new to me recently, but I've seen it's become widespread. From other HN threads, it sounds like it's based on what Judge Alsup wrote in the Bartz v. Anthropic case, in which Anthropic's destroying scanned books was one factor supporting a finding of fair use. I could see companies wanting to try to fit their activities into the same contours that the court approved there, since they could then argue that they should be just as protected as the defendant in that case was (that is, it may have inadvertently established a set of practices that companies would like to copy). However, it doesn't seem to me that the court concluded that destroying books was necessarily required (in particular because the contrary scenario wasn't examined there). That is, the court felt that destroying scanned books made the fair use argument stronger, but didn't say, as far as I know, that the fair use argument would necessarily fail without it. But indeed, I guess it might take a lot for a company to decide to create a different and untested fact pattern and then defend it from scratch in new litigation.