a) When a company has made a digitized copy of it
b) When a few previous hard copies are kept somewhere in the world
Idk what Anthropic plans to do with this, but note that my original comment was not about Anthropic at all. I simply think it's a good tradeoff to destroy a few copies of rare books if that helps digitizing them. I am not against simply legally forcing companies that do this to release those copies in due time. In the meantime I am also happy to have them as part of the LLM corpus.
> illegally?
No, copying rare books is very likely not illegal, because, presumably, they are quite old.
Oh no, a lump of cellulose is gone. Will no one think of the fibers?
But it ... won't be? The companies have no motivation to do so. The copyright on lots of these books are surely already expired, so if they wanted to they could be putting these up now. I'm sure internally this is viewed as a corpus of knowledge they have that their competitors do not, so they will not release them unless something forces them to.
> 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).
Even if the authors died immediately after publication there is no way the copyright has expired.