In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
When a bookstore goes out of business or just can’t sell a book, they don’t return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. When I was a kid our hometown bookstore went out of business and I watched them throw away 2 metal dumpsters full of coverless books. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn’t make it okay.
I don’t mind if they destroy 10k copies of Fabio’s books. It’s probably not even half of the print run so for a thing, it’s guaranteed to be no harm because there’s enough copies around.
But when you say destroy ALL books, you’re also talking about rare first edition of whatever Shakespeare did, and manuscripts of Beethoven, and authors that I am fond of but I have no chance to buy used or new, or find in a library, because it’s not popular and/or is in a language that is not from the place I live. And that’s not cool.
So first things first, no single entity can have access to all books. Not even reputable historians would get access to anything they just ask around. Then there’s books that have few copies and no one has any clue where they are. Etc etc.
Haha I remembered this post and though it was worth dropping it here
https://piefed.social/c/historymemes/p/1739559/uncle-claudius-s-bibliography-forever-lost