THE WAR AGAINST CASH EXPANDS TO BOOKS

We've been on a technical-conspiracy "theme" this week, and today's whopper doozie of a story was shared by M.D.(with our thanks), and trust me, it may even exceed the rather fluid confines and boundaries of what I consider a "whopper doozie", and spill over into Gargantumongousgollywhopper territory. I'll leave it to the reader to decide which it is. Ostensibly, the reader will note that the story is about artificial intelligence destroying print books. But there's a lot more going on:

Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models

Note the following:

On Monday, court documents revealed that AI company Anthropic spent millions of dollars physically scanning print books to build Claude, an AI assistant similar to ChatGPT. In the process, the company cut millions of print books from their bindings, scanned them into digital files, and threw away the originals solely for the purpose of training AI—details buried in a copyright ruling on fair use whose broader fair use implications we reported yesterday.

The 32-page legal decision tells the story of how, in February 2024, the company hired Tom Turvey, the former head of partnerships for the Google Books book-scanning project, and tasked him with obtaining “all the books in the world.” The strategic hire appears to have been designed to replicate Google’s legally successful book digitization approach—the same scanning operation that survived copyright challenges and established key fair use precedents.

Now note that: "fair use" has been extended to include copying an entire book, in order to build out an artificial intelligence platform. To put that country simple: there is no longer any such thing as intellectual property.  Anything you or I may have written or may write, is "fair use" and utterly free data for the artificial intelligence companies to own and profit from.  But there's more...

Consider this carefully:

While destructive scanning is a common practice among some book digitizing operations, Anthropic’s approach was somewhat unusual due to its documented massive scale. By contrast, the Google Books project largely used a patented non-destructive camera process to scan millions of books borrowed from libraries and later returned. For Anthropic, the faster speed and lower cost of the destructive process appears to have trumped any need for preserving the physical books themselves, hinting at the need for a cheap and easy solution in a highly competitive industry.

Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. Had Anthropic stuck to this approach from the beginning, it might have achieved the first legally sanctioned case of AI fair use. Instead, the company’s earlier piracy undermined its position.

And thus we arrive at Anthropic's practice of buying physical books, scanning them, and then destroying the physical copy:

Publishers legally control content that AI companies desperately want, but AI companies don’t always want to negotiate a license. The first-sale doctrine offered a workaround: Once you buy a physical book, you can do what you want with that copy—including destroy it. That meant buying physical books offered a legal workaround.

And yet buying things is expensive, even if it is legal. So like many AI companies before it, Anthropic initially chose the quick and easy path. In the quest for high-quality training data, the court filing states, Anthropic first chose to amass digitized versions of pirated books to avoid what CEO Dario Amodei called “legal/practice/business slog”—the complex licensing negotiations with publishers. But by 2024, Anthropic had become “not so gung ho about” using pirated ebooks “for legal reasons” and needed a safer source.

...

Buying used physical books sidestepped licensing entirely while providing the high-quality, professionally edited text that AI models need, and destructive scanning was simply the fastest way to digitize millions of volumes. The company spent “many millions of dollars” on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals.

In other words, the whole buying-scanning-destroying-the-original process was a "work around" to the process of having to negotiate licensing fees with a publisher of a specific work. It was, to put it country simple once again, a way to side-step intellectual property rights, to expand the fair use doctrine (only if you're an AI-tech company, of course; all others need not apply). Or to put it with even more country simplicity: it was a way to avoid paying anything to the authors of the books or to their publishers.

I am bold to suggest there's an even bigger issue looming here, one that I have warned about many times, and do so again: the ultimate aim of all of this digitalization is to remove - absolutely - any controls the author has over his thoughts and words. It if is "fair use" now to buy hard copy books, scan and then destroy the original, it is but a short step to the requirement that the digital copy be believed when no original copy can be found, and even over the protestations of the author. "I did not write that!"  "But it says here that you did! Can you prove otherwise?" "No, becuase you destroyed all the hard copies." It is a short step, in fact, to the outright outlawing of the possession of any hard copy of a work (doubtless "environmental" factors will be cited to justify such measures). Libraries may continue to exist, but access will be severely restricted.

In short, you're looking at the other side of the beast system: they want a system where they can literally change the value of your "digital monetary unit" depending on how well you conform to their wishes. They need a total surveillance system to do this. Similarly, they want a system where they can literally change the content of the records of your thought. Again, they need not only a total surveillance system to do this, but also to eliminate the hard copy analogues to cash - the book, the magazine, the newsletter, the newspaper - themselves.

Amazon does not call it kindle for nothing, folks, because it's all about burning the books. Only then can they make you say what you did not say. And no, Anthropic,  Google, Micros**t or any other artificial intelligence platform, I do not give you permission to cite any of my works, books, blogs, essays, or interviews in whole or in part.  And for the rest of this mad digitally-addicted culture, if you want to find out what I think and why, contact me and ask me directly.  I won't bite. I might mutter and sputter a bit in frustration. But I won't bite. Even better, read one of my books in the actual hard copy from the publisher. They are the only canonical copies of my work.  Going shopping? Use cash. Want to read? Buy a real physical book, or magazine, or newspaper, and don't consult any artificial intelligence platform for a "summary", much less a pirated copy.

See you on the flip side...

(If you enjoyed today's blog, please share it with your friends.)