books

<p>Finished <a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/17152292/t/Mistborn-Secret-History" rel="nofollow">Mistborn: Secret Histories</a> novella. Don’t want to spoil, but it was really exciting to read this secret history.</p><p>Read <a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/11921345" rel="nofollow">Redshirts</a> by John Scalzi. A sci-fi about the “redshirts” in a Star-Trek like universe. Highly recommended for any Star Trek fan.</p><p>Started <a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/8103463/" rel="nofollow">Rosemary and Rue</a> by Seanan McGuire. First book in her October Daye urban fantasy series. This is my first Seanan McGuire book, have heard a lot about her.</p><p>Still skimming through <a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/22205950/" rel="nofollow">The Bullet Journal Method</a> by Ryder Caroll.</p><p>Putting <a href="https://www.librarything.com/work/30205807/" rel="nofollow">Ultra-processed Food</a> by Chris van Tulleken on hold for a bit, shouldn’t have started multiple non-fiction at once. Will pick it up after finishing the Bullet Journal Method.</p><p>Bingo squares covered: Short and Sweed, Award Winner (Hard mode)</p><p>What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?</p><p>For details on the c/Books bingo challenge that just restarted for the year, you can checkout the initial <a href="https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/28953205" rel="nofollow">Book Bingo</a>, and its <a href="https://threadiverse.link/lemmy.world/post/28953205" rel="nofollow">Recommendation Post</a>. Links are also present in our community sidebar.</p>

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>But if you’re not intimately familiar with the AI industry and copyright, you might wonder: Why would a company spend millions of dollars on books to destroy them? Behind these odd legal maneuvers lies a more fundamental driver: the AI industry’s insatiable hunger for high-quality text.</p>