[Cynddl]

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).

[infinite_spin]

> 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.

[ACCount37]

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.

[sidewndr46]

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?

[eru]

There might be special rules around DRM that go beyond normal copyright?

[jdub]

Ladies and gentlemen, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act

(which is terrible, but I would be delighted if they breached it and got thoroughly spanked)

[ACCount37]

I would be delighted if AI companies got together and thoroughly dismantled DMCA.

That atrocity of a law was a blight upon digital freedom since the day it came to exist. DRM should never have been given any legal protection - and I would push for numerous forms of DRM to be outlawed instead.

[sidewndr46]

so if I base64 encode my blog, have some Javascript that 'validates' an authorized viewer and then decodes the base64 into HTML which is added to the DOM does that constitute DRM ?

[streetfighter64]

> Why would DRM on a digital copy of a book matter?

Because DRM is just a way to make "breaking copyright" more practically cumbersome. What's easier, breaking digital DRM for each and every E-book you find, or just establishing a single pipeline for scanning physical books?

[sidewndr46]

breaking DRM is so easy my generation was doing it as kids, there is no technical obstacle there.

[TeMPOraL]

It's a manual process.

More importantly, it's also explicitly illegal. Destructive format-shifting is not. Thank copyright laws.

[tokai]

Non of those are rare. All a available in libraries for ILL.

[timmmmmmay]

so... not rare, then? another fear mongering article lying to everyone.