{"id":3618,"date":"2026-08-24T04:39:05","date_gmt":"2026-08-24T08:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3618"},"modified":"2026-08-24T04:39:05","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T08:39:05","slug":"ftc-must-investigate-ai-book-burning","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/?p=3618","title":{"rendered":"FTC Must Investigate AI Book Burning"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>On Friday, Demand Progress Education Fund and a coalition of civil society advocates asked the FTC to investigate AI companies like <a href=\"https:\/\/us.list-manage.com\/zvsSOAn5fE3?e=d347305a45&amp;c2id=2316cfb0576a5fb9816f5f64299f8f05\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Anthropic<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/us.list-manage.com\/OsXfSnGhGLi?e=d347305a45&amp;c2id=2316cfb0576a5fb9816f5f64299f8f05\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Amazon<\/a> for buying books in bulk, scanning them and then destroying the original work\u2014including rare books. In a letter sent to the FTC, the organizations urge the agency to use its authority, including Section 6(b) of the FTC Act, to investigate whether this mass book-destroying practice unfairly prevents competing AI developers and the public from using these resources. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li> <a href=\"https:\/\/us.list-manage.com\/Uhy5TUfO2DH?e=d347305a45&amp;c2id=2316cfb0576a5fb9816f5f64299f8f05\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Read the Letter<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Convened by Demand Progress Education Fund, the letter was also signed by the Consumer Federation of America, the Center for Media &amp; Digital Governance at Open Markets Institute, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and 14 other organizations.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe secretive and reckless way that major AI companies like Anthropic and Amazon are acting shows that there is real smoke here that the FTC needs to investigate,\u201d <strong>said Demand Progress Education Fund Special Advisor Kate Oh<\/strong>. \u201cThere is credible reporting that the AI industry is acquiring books on vast commercial scales to scan and destroy, all to keep that scanned text in a private database walled off from the world and subject to corporate censorship and manipulation.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen a small number of dominant tech companies become the sole custodians of millions of human-authored works in digital form, locked away inside proprietary corporate databases\u2014including works they have caused to exist nowhere else\u2014they convert a shared public resource into a private chokepoint,\u201d <strong>stated the letter<\/strong>. \u201cThey make themselves the unaccountable gatekeepers of our shared historical and cultural record, with the ability to censor as they see fit. That outcome should concern the FTC because the antimonopoly laws exist not only to protect competition but to prevent any private actor from amassing control incompatible with a free and self-governing society.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On Friday, Demand Progress Education Fund and a coalition of civil society advocates asked the FTC to investigate AI companies like Anthropic and Amazon for buying books in bulk, scanning them and then destroying the original work\u2014including rare books. In a letter sent to the FTC, the organizations urge the agency to use its authority, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"registered_only","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[742],"class_list":["post-3618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ciencia-y-tecnologia","tag-vr-news-net"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3618"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3618\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vr-news.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}