The Forever Library - by Zafer Balkan - The Traces

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The Forever Library<br>Copyright was built to police who may copy, not whether anything survives to be copied

Zafer Balkan<br>Aug 23, 2026

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Incendie Alexandrie by Hermann Goll<br>In Norman Jewison’s 1975 film Rollerball, an old librarian leads Jonathan E. into an archive run by a supercomputer everyone calls “the world’s file cabinet.” He is not proud of what he is about to show. He is embarrassed. Somewhere in the shuffling between machines, his staff has misplaced ”the whole of the 13th century”, every card that held it, gone, and nobody in the room can quite say how. He does not call it a catastrophe. He calls it distracting.<br>The joke depends on one fact the film never states outright: there was only one file cabinet. Comprehensiveness and a single point of failure are the same design, and losing a century inside it registers as an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe only because nothing here is real. Redundancy, not custodianship, is the only thing that has ever kept information from disappearing. Zero didn’t have any.<br>Thanks for reading The Traces! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

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Scene from Rollerball (1975)<br>Anthropic’s handling of books was neither embarrassed nor an accident. The company hired Tom Turvey, who had run partnerships for Google Books, in February 2024; an internal memo that April described obtaining, in substance, every book in the world. Under a programme called Project Panama, print books were acquired in bulk, their bindings sliced away, the loose pages fed through scanners, and the paper thrown out. Court filings unsealed in the litigation put the spending in the tens of millions of dollars.<br>For most of what went through that process, redundancy survived: the books were common enough that destroying one copy left the text intact everywhere else. That is the case this essay has to address first, because it is the one the standard objection reaches for.<br>Alexandria

The comparison that followed was Alexandria, and for the bulk of Project Panama it fails on its own terms. Alexandria destroyed the only copies. Anthropic’s books were bought from wholesalers and second-hand dealers precisely because they were abundant, and the text of most of them survived the guillotine, cleaner, searchable, better indexed than before. A judge found the scanning fair use. Take that as given. For the common stock, no text was lost, because redundancy was never at risk. It does not hold for all of it. Reporting from 404 Media, an investigation that physically tracked a shipment with an Apple AirTag from a rare-books dealer to an Amazon-linked scanning facility, found that the acquisitions also included rare, antique, and out-of-print volumes, some of which exist only in physical form, meaning no digital copy exists anywhere else. That is not the same claim as there being only one physical copy left in the world; a book can be undigitized and still sit in library collections Anthropic never touched. But it is enough to break the assumption the abundant case rests on. Nobody outside Anthropic knows how many other copies of these specific volumes still exist, and destroying the one Anthropic bought removed the only copy whose survival can be confirmed. That is not “text survived” in the sense the essay’s opening claim relies on. It is text whose confirmed existence moved from public and redundant to private and singular, which is closer to what Alexandria did than the comparison is usually given credit for.<br>What Copyright Enforces

The instinct is to reach for copyright as the thing that should have prevented this. It can’t, because it was never built to. Copyright is government enforcement of a private property claim over a specific act, reproduction, not a duty to steward information across its actual life: creation, transmission, storage, decay, and whatever maintenance keeps it legible after that. Anthropic didn’t evade copyright to do what it did. It combined ownership of the physical copies, which let it destroy them, with a court’s finding that scanning and training on the resulting text was fair use. Money bought both halves of that combination, and everyone outside the transaction was excluded from all of it. The claim underneath this, that information can be property at all, doesn’t survive examination. Jefferson noticed the flaw in a letter to Isaac McPherson in August 1813: a person who receives an idea from another gains instruction without diminishing the giver. Stephan Kinsella states the mechanism directly: property rules exist to resolve conflicting claims over rivalrous resources, and information generates no such conflict, because one party holding it does not prevent another from holding the same sequence of words. Information cannot coherently be called property, because property answers a question, who gets the object when two parties want it, that information...