I stopped using Amazon like 8 years ago over various previous inhumane issues
Seems the rest of the world prefers slightly more convenience
What are you gonna do I guess
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
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I ask people every now and then, the theme of the answer is similar: one stop shopping, it’s easier than looking elsewhere, answering with the question where else am I going to go? People tend to take the shortest path between A and B.
There are some things you can only find there, sure, but there’s more of a shopping dopamine hit if you look around. Other retailers do exist. Most of the time you can find it elsewhere.
just remember. the planet is going to be just fine.
remember how quickly wildlife came back when covid shutdowns hit? it'll be like that when the last human dies.
The last human will be descendant of billionaires who’s lineage lived underground for 8 generations
Just change one other mind. If everyone did the same they would be gone in no time. Do two and it will be done even sooner.
More alarming was the upshot of that lawsuit: a judge ruled that because Anthropic was turning the physical texts into digital ones and destroying the original copies, it was “transformative” and therefore didn’t violate copyright law.
So by that token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid. Otherwise, having it ingested by an AI has no purpose it it's not meant to be referenced in response to requests by the end user.
Copyright law is not some philosophically derived right it's literally just a government granted Monopoly that was invented in the 1700s because printers wanted dibs on books. It literally serves Now function other than giving advantages to our corporate overlords
No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.
SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people's printed works.
Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it's passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.
But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn't apply to anything else. So you can't use "physical medium" because books are a special case and have their own special US law.
For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Anthropic - I want to convert it to weights for use in massive matrix multiplication operations.
Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.
Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Google - I want to convert it to a searchable database of terms that can refer you to the correct ISBN.
And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it's just under a different framework known as the DMCA.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to watch the movie.
That's not transformative.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to take clips to make memes.
That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole "fair use" thing.
This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I'm not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren't true.
And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren't LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it's impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.
The articles are oversimplifying because the law is impossibly complex, but the moral hazard is obvious.
It’s like they’re murdering orphans and someone tries to argue it’s actually state sanctioned manslaughter.
Amazon never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity
there’s this idea in the AI development zeitgeist that “rare data” is the only advantage left. this stuff is almost certainly motivated by that type of thinking. if they can have data in their datasets that no one else does, they view that as the only way left to be ahead of the competition.
So Amazon should be destroyed to train humans?
Where I draw the line for whether it is ethical to light things on fire is when they start destroying rare knowledge and books as fast as possible for no other reason than to hoard and obscure knowledge for private benefit.
It is one thing to fund the creation of knowledge and then hoard it, it is entirely another to begin actively attacking and destroying pre-existing publicly shared resources of knowledge in the pursuit of monetizing access to that very knowledge behind a gargantuan profit motivated entity.
They're destroying the books because it's cheaper than scanning them intact.