Comment by Cynddl
7 hours ago
The 404media article mentions notably https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi... which says:
> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
> Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021)
How is a book from 2021 considered rare in this context? There's almost certainly a digital copy of it in existence prior to Anthropic purchasing a print edition.
Niche text. It's not impossible that there was only ever under a thousand of them printed and released into circulation.
A digital copy would exist somewhere, of course. But for us, that only matters if we can buy or download it. And for AI companies, that only matters if they can get a digital copy DRM-free and licensed permissively enough.
This argument doesn't make any sense. All manner of AI companies just ingest whatever random text they can find on the internet to train their data, including copyrighted publications. Why would DRM on a digital copy of a book matter?
9 replies →
Non of those are rare. All a available in libraries for ILL.
so... not rare, then? another fear mongering article lying to everyone.