Where are the sources for that?
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AI companies are shredding rare books
321–330 of 559 posts
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 CL…
This would create incentive to kill people
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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s even noted they’re looking for text pre 2022 as afterward, it’s tainted by their own shit, they don’t believe in the crap they’re making.
> they don’t believe in the crap they’re making A spurious claim; they simply want to avoid model collapse.
Simply? It’s flawed if you can’t train on new data past 2022 without first checking ai hasn’t tainted it. Dismissing that as simply avoiding model collapse seems to miss the point.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#324> 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…
Machines for non-destructively scanning books were developed and perfected long ago. The destructive scanning is neither technological limitation nor an issue of expedience. It's an issue of copyright law and fair use.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
I strongly disagree with this take, a book might remain readable thousands of years from now but very few if not zero of our digital data formats likely will. We shouldn't be so quick to throw away diversity in the way information which may be useful for future generations is stored for the long term.
Paper doesn't easily survive for thousands of years. You know that pleasant used bookstore smell? It's paper slowly decomposing.
I'd be willing to bet that there's a lot more readable paper from thousands of years ago than there will be readable digital data from today in thousands of years. Digital information has to be actively preserved in every case, whereas paper can be passively preserved in some cases.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 CL…
> copyright should just die with the author That would have a few undesirable consequences... for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are. The complexity of our legal system is in many cases justified. The problems are often the numbers (duration of copyright protection etc.)
> for example, you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 CL…
20 years to make some money, and then we set the work free for the public benefit. If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights.
It also solves the issue of potentially not knowing when the author died, with a fixed period (the number isn't so important imo so long as it's sane), a work is out of copyright x years after the first known copy was published.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea here is that the frontier labs are no longer willing to risk using the likes of Anna’s Archive, because they have already been held legally liable for that in the past.
Are you referring to the META lawsuit? I think the current landscape is not bad for the frontier labs -- it's settled law that it's legal to 'read' and ingest this data. Anthropic went ahead and just settled a licensing deal for content. The open issue in that META suit is whether or not any distribution happened, as I understand it. I'm certain they all have full backups of the archive somewhere in the org.
Yes, that’s the case I’m on about. Training notwithstanding, I’m pretty sure downloading the torrent was a crime to begin with.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#329The publishers sued AI companies for training on shadow library data, hoping to negotiate content deals for big $$$ down the line. Instead, they got analog hole'd. Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25 is way cheaper than paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers. What I don't buy is it being "rare, precious books". First, they're not after ancient texts - they're after t…
So they're not valuable... except to AI companies. They should pay a fair amount.
Why are you assuming they aren't? The people who have those books are choosing to sell them for a price. What isn't fair?
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#330I'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…
I've never read a coherent argument for why all of these "should"s should be. I understand you want to read the books. But I don't see how that desire results in the laws needing to be changed so that you can read everything you want, even things the author or owner doesn't want you to read.
There is not a shortage of books in print. I don't understand why people get so hung up on a few of them being out of print. It is okay for someone to own something cool and not let anyone see it. The cool thing doesn't suddenly become a societal necessity because it is words written down.