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.”
It’s not secret, it was their defence when they got sued for copyright infringement. Instead of download all the books from Anna’s archive like meta, they buy a copy, cut the binding, scan it, then destroy it. “We bought a copy for personal use then use the content for profit, it’s not piracy”
The fact that they destroyed the books is the most reprehensible thing to me. They could have resold or donated those books to libraries. Instead, they chose the ugliest and most wasteful thing they could possibly do. Despicable.
It was physical books?
Well you don’t “scan” a book that’s already digital.
Oh. I do that every day
I assume “destructively scan” means to cut the spine off so they lie flat, and that one copy of each book will be scanned? Isn’t that a pretty normal way of doing it in cases where the prints aren’t rare?
Probably, yes. I think there’s a copyright reason behind destroying the book?
Not copyright, as much as if the book isn’t precious, it’s easier to do that, feed the loose pages into the scanner, and then get an intact one if you want it, compared to the additional expense of having to build and program a machine to carefully turn the pages and photograph what’s inside, or the time it would need by comparison.
