you wouldn't believe how much shredding your local library does in the name of space conservation and to address changing borrower preferences and demographics. I doubt any AI company comes close to the annual combined library turnover
AI companies are shredding rare books
121–130 of 559 posts
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Niche text. It's not impossible that there was only ever under a thousand of them printed and released into circulation. A digital copy would exist somewhere, of course. But for us, that only matters if we can buy or download it. And for AI companies, that only matters if they can get a digital copy DRM-free and licensed permissively enough.
This argument doesn't make any sense. All manner of AI companies just ingest whatever random text they can find on the internet to train their data, including copyrighted publications. Why would DRM on a digital copy of a book matter?
There might be special rules around DRM that go beyond normal copyright?
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
So if the Mona Lisa is part of a model we can burn it?
I pre-empted this - my argument does not apply to texts where the physical object is a major part of the historical value of the thing. No, I'm not saying to destroy one of the four remaining Magna Cartas that were meticulously copied by hand. But even if I was, we're only dealing with texts here that are irrelevant enough to have never been digitised already - we tend to digitise most things of value and so the Mona…
> I am however OK with destroying one of the remaining 50 children's books of which only 300 copies …
What if the perception of those books change over time and are considered masterpieces later on?
Moby Dick was out of print when Melville died 1891 and not a huge success until it got a revival in the 1920s
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#124I've limited sympathy for the publishers. It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright. And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are stil…
Books in the 17th and 18th century often didnt get bound by the publisher. They were done by independent binders for _custom_ orders. You’d see whole libraries with the owners binding/cover standards rather than per book.
Books in that time were _luxury_ goods. Most people could not afford them. One of the ways that was changed was to introduce cheap, mass produced bindings that were lower quality than the bespoke artisianal bindings done by specialist craftsmen.
You can still get custom bindings done. There exists whole niches on the internet of crafters that will take a production run book and strip its binding and make you extremely high quality and custom bindings and covers.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#125We reprint old books after checking out copyrights (for all books, this means pre-1930, but for some (I'd actually say most) it also means ones published up to 1964 and 1973, depending on how the rightsholders did (or didn't) do the renewals). We use a special guillotine type cutter to cut off the binding and then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely in…
Why cut off the spines? Isn't that how you end up getting unattributed 'dead sea scrolls'?
Easier to send them through a duplex scanner (or put them in a flatbed one if they are fragile). Cheaper than buying the automated ones with the page turning robot arm.
I have done it at home for my books since the mid-00s.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#126From what I understand, the rare books in question are not some historically relevant medieval manuscripts, but rather some relatively recent books (still under copyright) for which there are few print copies available for purchase. I am not sure that physically destructing one copy of this type of book to preserve its contents digitally is so bad. Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable…
> Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable only for its content, not for the physical medium it's printed on.
Well, there are special collectors editions with the signature of the author and gold pages or whatnot. But the AI companies are probably not using those.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#127Is this true? Rare books would very often be out of copyright for a start. What the the actual ruling that says you can scan if you destroy the original? ISBNdb is a database of book information, as you would guess from the name.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper. What happens to the pages after? No one needs them anymore, so they get mulched and recycled. That would be the dominant scanning method even if copyright wasn't a thing. But then again - if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to sc…
Think about that last point for a moment. Our “rights to read” are diminished significantly with digital works as compared to printed works. Right of resale. Right to lend. In the end, digital publishing just isn’t right and will lead to massive gap in our historical records. They require active curation and cannot be preserved simply by resting on a dusty shelf.
Every innovation since the microprocessor isn't worth saving in the grand scheme of things.
When today's algae evolve enough into tomorrow's sentient creatures, they're really only going to need up to the industrial revolution and should probably stop right before that.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#129Is this true? Rare books would very often be out of copyright for a start. What the the actual ruling that says you can scan if you destroy the original? ISBNdb is a database of book information, as you would guess from the name.
It's cheaper to destructively scan.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#130> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright…
> You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal.
An 18th century book would be out of copyright so why would it be illegal to keep the original and scan it?