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AI companies are shredding rare books

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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#231

Post by shimman »

phoghed wrote: post #182
9dev wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We manage to do this for endangered wildlife too without anyone counting every single specimen; why shouldn’t we be able to estimate how rare a book is?

And if you instituted this, the commenters of this very website would surely decry it as a prime example of government overstep and waste.

Commentators on this web site work for some of the most evil organizations on the planet and have beliefs that 95% of the population rejects. You can safely ignore the YC cohort of devs and be fine.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#232

Post by nyeah »

squidbeak wrote: post #114

I'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…

Yeah it's as if the publishers are somehow strapped for cash compared to AI companies.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#233

Post by phoghed »

shimman wrote: post #228
phoghed wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s been determined that training on lawfully acquired works is fair use. Presumably in this discussion of shredding physical books Dario and Sam are not pulling heists at the local library. I’m sure there’s ongoing litigation, and better sources than this, but fair use was determined in June 2025 in a sf federal district court https://www.goodwinlaw.com/en/insights/publications/2025/06/... Similar conclusion vs met…

Might surprise people to learn but the law isn't the final arbiter on what is moral or just. The law only decides what is legal and as we've seen over our lived history as humans, many "legal" things may not be those we want society to uphold.

Yes IP theft and fair use are discussing legality, not morality. Whether or not it’s moral for someone to make money off somebody else’s labor or Reddit comments, I don’t want to get into a discussion about personally.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#235

Post by edoloughlin »

ACCount37 wrote: post #28
est31 wrote: post #8

> 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…

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…

> What happens to the pages after? No one needs them anymore, so they get mulched and recycled.

Strictly speaking, no one needs the Sistine Chapel or the Pietà etc. It would be a shame if they were mulched and recycled, though.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#236

Post by cestith »

sethops1 wrote: post #24
est31 wrote: post #8

> 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…

> Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? It's cheaper to scan the books if you do it destructively. Cost. That's why they're shredding irreplaceable texts. Nothing to do with copyright. https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...

One doesn’t need to pulp the pages after scanning though. After scanning, they could be rebound and put into a library.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#237

Post by tekne »

krunck wrote: post #206

In a society that values science and knowledge, preservation of knowledge - and no, slurping text up into an LLM is not preservation - is more important than profits. These companies are regressive book burners.

You know, I'm pretty sure post-slurping the text is still there...

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#238

Post by genxy »

krunck wrote: post #206

In a society that values science and knowledge, preservation of knowledge - and no, slurping text up into an LLM is not preservation - is more important than profits. These companies are regressive book burners.

I love it. Literally burning down civilization to generate losses from slop. This reminds me of the Simpsons Halloween episode where Homer gets a taste for his own flesh and eats himself to death.

Maybe the Library of Alexandria didn't burn, it was digested.

The market has solved the what do with excess knowledge problem.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#239

Post by sidewndr46 »

jdub wrote: post #152
eru wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There might be special rules around DRM that go beyond normal copyright?

Ladies and gentlemen, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (which is terrible, but I would be delighted if they breached it and got thoroughly spanked)

so if I base64 encode my blog, have some Javascript that 'validates' an authorized viewer and then decodes the base64 into HTML which is added to the DOM does that constitute DRM ?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#240

Post by dingaling »

emddudley wrote: post #86
_m_p wrote: post #73

Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding": https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...

Libraries are not archives, and weeding does not mean destruction.

Libraries in my area dispose of 'weeded' books by covert means, so that public ire isn't aroused by finding dumpsters full of discarded books.

They are most assuredly destroyed.

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