Тег: copywriting

A bonfire of books for the sake of copyism: a dystopia in which we are already living

Imagine this scene: trucks pull up, unloading millions of printed books, after which they are ruthlessly unstitched, passed through scanners, and then sent to the shredder, to the knife, and to the paper mill.
 
Do you think this is a grim dystopian scenario? No, this is the harsh reality of 2026. Anthropic, the creators of the Claude neural network, turned millions of physical books into confetti to train their AI model. You might immediately think about how they are techno-fascists who have completely lost their minds. But the wildest thing about this situation is that they didn’t resort to this vandalism out of spite, not by choice, and certainly not out of hatred for literature.
 
Under the idiotic “intellectual property” laws in the US, if you buy a book and scan it, but keep the physical original on your shelf, you instantly become a pirate who has created an “illegal copy.” It is precisely because of this legal absurdity that authorities constantly persecute free network libraries like Zlib or Anna’s Archive.
 
To avoid being crushed by multi-billion dollar lawsuits from holders of copyright privileges, corporate bean counters found a loophole: if the paper original is physically destroyed during the digitization process, then everything is legally fine. One copy existed—and one copy remains, it has simply changed format. Therefore, Anthropic literally had to shred millions of books just so that the digital copies would be recognized as “legal.”
 
Ray Bradbury, in his novel “Fahrenheit 451,” warned us about firefighters burning books. But he, a naive romantic, thought this would happen because of direct state censorship. Bradbury held politicians in too high regard. In our reality, government authorities are destroying millions of valuable books through their moronic laws simply to protect copyright privileges.
 
And the scale of the tragedy is colossal. It’s not just worn-out pulp fiction going to the knife. Entire second-hand bookstores and warehouses where the rarest works gather dust are being bought up, many of which are only available in one or a few copies. What can never be printed again is being destroyed.
 
There is one important nuance to this book genocide. Do you know why AI corporations are hunting so fiercely for old paper literature? Because texts published until approximately 2022 are pure, one hundred percent, organic human products. No neural network hallucinations. In the future, the value of such printed books will constantly increase—it is a rock-solid guarantee that the text was written by humans, not by AI. And this unique heritage is now being irrevocably ground into dust.
 
But let’s look at this situation from the perspective of human survival. The destruction of paper books is playing with fire in the most literal sense. We live in an extremely fragile world. Imagine any global natural or man-made disaster: a massive solar flare, a large-scale EMP strike, a meteorite impact, or a total blackout. Data centers will go up in smoke. The much-vaunted “clouds” will dissipate. Servers will turn into useless scrap metal overnight.
 
Where will the survivors get basic knowledge about engineering, first aid, water purification, or agronomy? From the Internet? But it’s gone. From libraries? But they were sent to the shredder so as not to upset the copyright holders.
 
The destruction of physical information carriers leaves civilization absolutely naked and defenseless against any global crisis. A paper book does not ask for electricity; it doesn’t need servers, updates, or a paid subscription. It simply silently holds knowledge, waiting for you to open it.
 
What conclusion does this lead to? When laws force us to destroy basic knowledge to please a stationary bandit, it is no longer about protecting authors’ rights. It is a real, direct existential threat to the survival of our entire civilization!

Voluntarist, Bitarch

If buying is not owning, then copying is not stealing

When someone talks about piracy, images from pirate movies usually spring to mind—a wooden leg, a bottle of rum, and a parrot. But in the digital world, things are a bit different. There, a pirate isn’t some guy stealing “riches” from poor authors. It’s more like a guy or a girl who keeps the doors of a massive digital library open for everyone.

Imagine Nintendo. The legendary company has released over 1,500 games over the last 40 years. Many of them are now lying in dusty boxes in attics or have long since rotted in landfills because it’s not profitable for the corporation to maintain old content. But who saved these games for history? Exactly, those same “pirates.” In the digital age, they are a kind of volunteer guarding cultural heritage. Piracy today is a guarantee that we won’t lose priceless culture tomorrow.

But isn’t this theft? This is where it gets interesting. Theft is when you take something from someone, and that person no longer has it. By downloading a movie, a song, or a book, you aren’t taking it away from the author. The file remains exactly where it was, in its original form. No real loss—except, perhaps, the copyright holder’s illusions about their hypothetical income.

Fine, but shouldn’t authors be paid for their work? Of course they should. But for the first copy of the product that buyers voluntarily purchased, the money was indeed paid. Everything else is an artificial monopoly imposed by the state (i.e., a privilege from a stationary bandit, which is what patents were openly called in the past).

It’s also important to understand that the modern copyright system (let’s call it “copyrism” for convenience) doesn’t allow us to fully own even the things we’ve already paid for. You bought a game? Great, but it’s tied to a dozen DRM protections that vet you like a border guard at an airport. Bought a Netflix subscription? You aren’t the owner of the movies, just a temporary tenant. Subscription ends—goodbye, favorite series. Copyrism is a cult of control where the user is always under suspicion. We have become tenants rather than owners of our own culture. Admit it, that’s not very market-like at all.

Lost sales are a myth. Companies love to calculate virtual losses: claiming that since you downloaded 10,000 copies of our album, we lost 10,000 sales! No, folks, you lost at most the chance to sell it to a few dozen people. The other 9,950 would most likely never have bought your product if they couldn’t download it for free. And you know what’s funny? The most active pirates spend more on music and movies than the average consumer! Because piracy is more like a sampler than a robbery.

Piracy also helps in cases where the copyright holder doesn’t want to or cannot help. Remember how HBO ruthlessly deleted favorite series from its servers when closing HBO Max? They were saved specifically by pirates. When a book is banned by censorship, the only hope of reading it is again through pirate sites. They literally support the freedom of information.

Free does not equal immoral! Libertarian ethics are simple: violence is bad. And when you make a copy of a digital file, you aren’t taking anything from anyone. But government raids on servers, million-dollar fines for students, and criminal cases against “pirates”—that is real violence. If an author is talented, grateful listeners, readers, and viewers will support them voluntarily. This is fair and free, and most importantly—non-violent.

What can we do? Advocate for the abolition of copyrism. Don’t be afraid to say out loud: copying is cooperation and the dissemination of knowledge, not theft. We are not obliged to feel guilty for simply wanting to freely manage our files and the culture that has long since become part of a common heritage. And one last thing: keep your torrent client handy. Because while corporations are playing Monopoly, pirates are the only ones truly ensuring the preservation of culture!

Voluntarist, Bitarch