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Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

(www.businessinsider.com)
390 points pyman | 1 comments | 07 Jul 25 09:20 UTC | HN request time: 0.405s | source
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ramon156 ◴[07 Jul 25 10:42 UTC] No.44488798[source]▶
Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation?

Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

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glimshe ◴[07 Jul 25 11:03 UTC] No.44488933[source]▶
Isn't "pirating" a felony with jail time, though? That's what I remember from the FBI warning I had to see at the beginning of every DVD I bought (but not "pirated" ones).
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pyman[dead post] ◴[07 Jul 25 11:16 UTC] No.44489024[source]▶
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1. Kim_Bruning ◴[07 Jul 25 17:33 UTC] No.44492704[source]▶
What someone at Anthropic did was download libgen once, then Anthropic figured "wait a minute, isn't that illegal?" , so instead they went and bought 7 million books for real and cut them up to scan them.

Turns out this doesn't quite mitigate downloading them first. (Though frankly, I'm very much against people having to buy 7 million books when someone has already scanned them)