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Anthropic bought millions of used print books, stripped the bindings, cut the pages loose, scanned them into training data, and threw the paper away. That comes straight from the court record. In Bartz v. Anthropic, an order filed June 23, 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that digitizing books the company had lawfully purchased was fair use. His summary is the coldest sentence I have read in a court order in years: “The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.”
People say “knowledge is power” flippantly, like a poster in a guidance counselor’s office next to “Hang in There” with the kitten trying to navigate a tightrope. Classically, knowledge was the literal operating system of power. Kings and religious orders ruled almost monolithically because they controlled the flow of information. Artificial intelligence (AI) is now democratizing knowledge harder and faster than the printing press did, and at the same moment we are cutting the chains of custody that prove where any of it came from. Data provenance, the ability to prove what existed, when, in what form, and on whose attestation, is the ground on which the next struggle for power gets fought, and only a public blockchain built for unbounded scale can hold it.
The piracy half of the case, downloading from the LibGen and PiLiMi shadow libraries, was not excused, and it produced a $1.5 billion class settlement, roughly $3,000 per work across some 500,000 works, with final approval on July 20, 2026. Capturing that knowledge in machines that can share it with anyone is genuinely good. Destroying the physical originals that anchor the record is genuinely bad.
Knowledge guilds ran the world
Consider the Freemasons, everyone’s favorite secret masters. The United Grand Lodge of England’s own history traces the fraternity’s origins to the medieval stonemasons who built castles and cathedrals. Those men apprenticed for about seven years in geometry and stonecraft, held their knowledge under oath, and a master running major works dined at the abbot’s high table. The oldest Masonic document, the Regius Manuscript of roughly 1425 to 1450, reads less like occult wisdom than like a trade association’s bylaws. Geometry was the monopoly; the mystique was marketing. By the time a Grand Lodge was constituted at London’s Goose and Gridiron alehouse on June 24, 1717, the math had escaped into books for the common man, and the guild that raised cathedrals was becoming a network of drinking buddies wearing silly aprons. Either that, or they moved on to controlling whatever knowledge now rules the world, and we will hear about it in 500 years. Who could know?
Kings ran the same racket at scale.
James VI of Scotland published “The True Law of Free Monarchies” in 1598: royal authority comes from God alone, and rebellion is both crime and sin. Bossuet, court bishop to Louis XIV, taught that the king’s person is sacred and his power answerable to no earthly authority. Then people learned to read, and eventually to measure. A 2009 study in PLOS ONE used that ability to read and measure, and traced roughly 3,000 relatives across 16 generations of Habsburgs and computed an inbreeding coefficient of 0.254 for Charles II of Spain, essentially what a parent-child union produces. “God’s anointed,” in this case, could not speak until he was four or walk until he was eight, and the Spanish Habsburg line died with him in 1700.
Science made it possible to notice that a lot of kings were inbred midwits wrapped in fine clothing and social engineering.
The church guarded its monopoly longest, and I say this as a churchman. For roughly a thousand years, the working scripture of Western Europe was the Latin Vulgate, readable only by the Latin-trained clerical class. A regional synod at Toulouse in 1229 forbade lay possession of vernacular scripture in its province. The Constitutions of Oxford in 1407 put English translation under episcopal approval on pain of excommunication. In October 1536, William Tyndale was strangled and burned for his English New Testament. Then Gutenberg’s movable type, invented in the 1450’s, reduced the price of a book to about one-eighth of that of a scribal manuscript, and European book production began doubling every 43 years instead of every 104 years (Buringh and Van Zanden, 2009). Martin Luther’s works alone were roughly 20 percent of all German pamphlet editions between 1500 and 1530, outpublishing every German Catholic controversialist combined by about five to one, per Mark U. Edwards Jr.’s “Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther.”
The Protestant Reformation was as much a supply chain innovation as it was a relious revolution.
Here’s a funny one that I discovered while researching for this article:
The Rothschilds, famous for control of the narrative, really did build the best private information network in Europe: the family’s own archiv documents a courier system of riders, boats, and agents running from 1814 that routinely beat official channels, and they used carrier pigeons for routine business messages, though the documentation starts in the 1840s, decades after the battle of Waterloo, which they are most famous for.
But here’s the rub, dear reader:
The famous story, Nathan Rothschild learning of Waterloo by pigeon and playing the panic into a colossal fortune amid the collapse of the London Stock Exchange, seems to be a fabrication… It traces to an antisemitic French pamphlet Georges Dairnvaell published in 1846, “Histoire édifiante et curieuse de Rothschild Ier, Roi des Juifs.” Historian Brian Cathcart’s “The News from Waterloo” (2015) demolishes the timeline, and the archive’s own assessment of any Waterloo profit is that it “must have been very considerably less than a million pounds.”
So that means, according to the official record, the most famous story ever told about information advantage is itself a 180-year-old provenance failure. A fabricated pamphlet outran the documented record because repeating a legend was free, and checking a receipt was nearly impossible.
When provenance fails, the lie with the best distribution becomes the history.
But the knowledge survived, so who cares about the paper?
The words made it into the machine. Information has never been more available. Why cry over dead trees?
Because a scan without a verifiable original is an editable memory.
Paper is hard to alter without leaving scars; a file in a private database is trivial to alter without leaving anything. Kill the physical anchor, and every surviving copy is exactly as trustworthy as whoever administers the server.
And an even worse problem:
Models are increasingly trained on text that models wrote: summaries of summaries, weights distilled from weights. Somewhere down that chain, another Dairnvaell fabrication gets in, and this time there is no bookshelf left to check him against.
That’s a nightmare of fake news becoming fake history, potentially forever.
I argue about Bitcoin‘s recent history for a living with people who were there, and we still cannot agree on what happened. That is with direct memory and known receipts. Imagine the same fight when the receipts are gone.
Notice what made the Anthropic ruling itself possible: receipts! The court could split the purchased books from the pirated libraries because the acquisition records existed to examine, purchase invoices on one side, and shadow-library downloads on the other. Provenance at work.
Enter the timestamp server
Bitcoin, as designed, is a distributed timestamp server that writes to a distributed database. Hash a scanned page, and you get a fingerprint that matches those exact bytes and nothing else. Anchor that hash on-chain with a timestamp and a signature, and you have a public, immutable attestation of what existed, when, and on whose word. Chain every derivative (the scan, the extracted text, the training corpus, the model output) back to its parent hash, and you have a provenance chain any stranger can audit forever without asking a guild for permission.
Heck of an inversion. The abbot, the royal censor, and the master mason ruled by gating access. A provenance ledger gates nothing but authenticity: the knowledge runs free while the proof of what it originally said stays nailed down in public.
It only works on a chain built for it.
Anchoring civilization’s libraries means billions of small transactions, which means unbounded block sizes and sub-cent fees, which means BSV, where Teranode-class throughput past a million transactions per second exists for exactly this workload. On a chain that treats block space as a luxury good, the receipts become a luxury good, and we are right back at the abbot’s high table.
The prescription fits on an index card.
Suppose you digitize a book, hash and anchor the scan before you touch the binding. If you train a model, anchor the manifest of what went in. If you publish, sign it. Libraries, archives, publishers, and yes, the AI labs: the marginal cost of keeping receipts has never been lower, and the cost of losing them has never been higher.
Kings fell when the people learned to read. The guild fell when geometry hit the print shops. The pulpit monopoly fell when the price of a Bible collapsed. Every one of those victories belonged to ordinary people, and every one depended on being able to prove what the record actually said.
“The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.” That is a fine description of a scanning bench.
It must not become the epitaph of the age or some of the dying words of a culture on the brink of forgetting itself.
Keep the receipts.
This opinion piece is published to encourage discussion. The author’s views are their own and do not constitute legal, procurement, or policy advice, nor do they represent the positions of CoinGeek or its partners.
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