The tech demons read dystopian fiction as blueprints and instruction manuals, not horrible warnings. Anthropic digested Bradbury’s book along with millions of others, and decided to do more than just copying Bradbury. They bought millions of books from used-book stores, scanned and stole the content, then destroyed the books.
The news story popped from emails revealed in the discovery stage of a huge lawsuit against Anthropic. I have a vested interest in the story as one of the authors who may receive payments from the lawsuit.
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Before it turned to physical books, the company first relied on digital ones. In 2021, Anthropic co-founder Ben Mann took it upon himself to download millions of books from LibGen, an online “shadow library” of freely available, pirated texts. The next year, Mann praised a new website called Pirate Library Mirror, which was upfront about the fact that it “deliberately” violated copyright law in most countries. Sending a link to the website to other employees, Mann enthused about the site’s launch, “just in time!!!” per WaPo.
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Physical destruction is different from digital theft. When you pirate digital content you’re not automatically preventing others from reading it, unless you seek and delete all copies on all servers. When you chop up millions of books, most of which are out of print, you’re preventing others from reading the books.
Bradbury would have seen this distinction from a different angle in 1952. Computers weren’t able to scan and copy books. Radio and TV were violating copyright in an ‘ethereal’ way, and the authors were fighting back effectively. The music industry, led by tough union boss Jimmy Petrillo, forced radio to pay serious royalties for playing records.
Today’s authors and musicians could use another Petrillo!
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Speaking of dystopia, Walker Percy would have appreciated the name Ben Mann. He wrote ‘Love in the Ruins’, the PERFECT dystopia for today. In 1971 he predicted iPhones, NeuraLink, Obama, Trump, BLM riots, assisted suicide, medicalized tyranny, electric cars, and pretty much everything else. His devil character was a pharma salesman named Art Immelmann, implying Forever Man. Ben Mann = Son of Man, an ideal name for an antichrist.
Also, I’m surprised that this story isn’t getting top billing at Substack, the Onlyfans for librarians. Maybe the substackers are already working for Anthropic.
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