@joepie91 Yes, they do.
But the problem is not only in Anthropic because they just want to destroy our books. They legally can't do anything about it because it's exactly the destruction of the book when transferring it's content from physical to digital which allows to consider that a fair use.
Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.
Here's the US district court decision about that, I took quotes from it:
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.231.0_4.pdf
So to me this is not as tragic as it's being framed. But I'd personally prefer to:
- Have a copyright reform.
- Have a requirement that if the company consumes the last copy of some book, they'd be required to provide it's digital version to the public. Or just provide all books to these companies for free in exchange of producing high quality digital copies for public use.
I say that because most people in the world don't have access to those books described as rare anyway. Someone from big US city being able to read them in the library isn't much better to me than giving it to Anthropic 🤷