Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AI companies are shredding rare books

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

241–250 of 559 posts

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#241

Post by sidewndr46 »

streetfighter64 wrote: post #221
sidewndr46 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Why would DRM on a digital copy of a book matter? Because DRM is just a way to make "breaking copyright" more practically cumbersome. What's easier, breaking digital DRM for each and every E-book you find, or just establishing a single pipeline for scanning physical books?

breaking DRM is so easy my generation was doing it as kids, there is no technical obstacle there.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#242

Post by ComputerPerson »

palmotea wrote: post #82
trollbridge wrote: post #69

We 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…

> We reprint old books after checking out copyrights Who is we? > then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely Is that the best thing for archival storage? Like could things like chemical breakdown increase the humidity in the sealed bag or concentrate corrosive chemical vapors? I was under the impression the best environment was an actively climate-contro…

The issue is mold. Sealed plastic bags for old books is a recipe for mold. At least they're individually stored, so they would develop mold at independent rates. (And maybe the seal allows airflow.)

Most books have some mold by the time they're ~100 years old, it's just not enough to cause a serious problem. Sealed enclosures (wrappings, bags, tubs) are a nightmare situation. Even packing books too tighly on shelves accelerates mold growth to problematic levels.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#243

Post by bitwize »

chii wrote: post #51
tencentshill wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they're not valuable... except to AI companies. They should pay a fair amount.

> They should pay a fair amount. they should pay the marginal value that the next buyer would buy. Do you also think that a person dying of thirst ought to pay the maximum price they could possibly pay for water?

If Elon Musk is dying of thirst then the price of that glass of water is set at (pinky to side of mouth) one million dollars.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#244

Post by karahime »

aerodexis wrote: post #157

Reminds me of Blood Meridian where The Judge meticulously sketches the rock glyphs that he comes across, and then destroys the original. Now that I think about it, The Judge is an apt metaphor for AI : "Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent."

No, it isn't. Nothing about training a model requires this. You're thinking of copyright, which does treat information this way.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#245

Post by bwfan123 »

There needs to be wider reporting of this if it is true. Where are the journalists ? If this is true, it is scorched earth on the world's knowledge base. And the business models are not proven yet. I can now see why some ai companies paints a dire picture of the future - they are basically annihilating all knowledge sources at the altar of their ai gods. I can also see why there is growing ai-skepticism.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#246

Post by mindslight »

Cider9986 wrote: post #222
mindslight wrote: post #171

The design of copyright has always been to restrict the dissemination of knowledge so that somebody can turn a profit. The handwaved justification is that the profit encourages the creation of new knowledge whose dissemination can be restricted, but that still doesn't erase the fundamental dynamic. This is merely the latest incarnation. We can imagine a slightly different process on a few fronts - AI companies pay to…

This is the correct take. Copyright has done more than anything else to prevent preservation and dissemination of knowledge. And it's forcing Anthropic's hand now. Although they could take more effort to preserve the books.

I'm not going to absolve Anthropic here (even though I am a satisfied customer). They could probably get a court decision that it's fair use to non-destructively scan books and keep the physical books, legal inability to directly distribute the results notwithstanding. And they certainly have enough money to pay for some old salt mines or whatever, or fund a library-type institution to do so.

What I'm indicting is the copyright regime being primarily focused on control and the prevention of dissemination. We can imagine a different world in which the publishers' suit against the Internet Archive went the other way (or was not even brought), and a public interest group sues Anthropic (et al) for destroying cultural commons, and gets a judgement saying all scanning must be done non-destructively and made available through institutions like the Internet Archive.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#248

Post by giancarlostoro »

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…

A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CLEARLY fair use, and even gets me to listen to the songs more, but they are stealing all revenue for a fair use video that took a lot of time and money to make to begin with, they are profiting from work they didn't even do. This is silly to me, I'm sure there's loads of other channels and videos out there screwed over by the record industry over 15 second samples from a song... Which should 100% be fair use and not be given to the record labels.

Issue is small streamers have no legal defense.

Edit, adding the channel I am referring to:

https://www.youtube.com/@diggingthegreats/videos

Post reply on HN