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AI companies are shredding rare books

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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#391

Post by ACCount37 »

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)

I would be delighted if AI companies got together and thoroughly dismantled DMCA.

That atrocity of a law was a blight upon digital freedom since the day it came to exist. DRM should never have been given any legal protection - and I would push for numerous forms of DRM to be outlawed instead.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#392

Post by fn-mote »

thdr wrote: post #317
giancarlostoro wrote: post #248

Earlier 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.)

> copyright should just die with the author

This makes sense when you’re thinking of a painting or a book.

Who owns the copyright to Windows or MacOS? A corporation. How do you deal with that?

> you wouldn't hire a 70 year old writer for your commercial project no matter how brilliant they are

Commercial projects are works-for-hire and the copyright is not owned by the person who does the work.

The proposal for the limit of copyright needs to be refined.

In the US, the current rule is:

> For … a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#393

Post by greenlimetea »

59percentmore wrote: post #319

Literally Rainbows End. Vinge was an oracle. It's a real shame that no one ever got that book in front of Hayao Miyazaki's eyes.

It's amazing what reading a word in that book like sousveillance can do.

I looked it up.

surveillance, sousveillance - sure, why not? Seems harmless.

But it's as if the more people know the word sousveillance, the word and even the act of surveillance actually loses a little bit of power (its embedding changes, if you will!)

All our fears about the end state of surveillance can now be countered by an end state of sousveillance.

Before I had sousveillance to think of, I could only think of surveillance (when thinking of veillances) - and it was more of a threat then than it is now.

The world is made of language, or as Terence McKenna said made out of words which sounds obviously false at first. But go looking for the inside of an atom and tell me what you find, and think about where the medium of reality actually implements itself.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#394

Post by fn-mote »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #342
weberer wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.

I would accept that as well, but crank it down to like 62 years since their date of birth, presumably by the time they would retire.

What?

Think this through some more.

Authors and artists are still creating after that age.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#395

Post by delecti »

this_was_posted wrote: post #370
thdr wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.)

Then just make it the rule that the copyright expires after 30 years or when the author dies, whichever comes last.

Why not just 30 years? Patents get a flat 20.

Not that I'm arguing for 30 per se, just that I don't see what goals of copyright would be advanced more by adding an "or until death" complication.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#397

Post by duzer65657 »

weberer wrote: post #291
Always42 wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would create incentive to kill people

I would change it to "the expected natural life of the author" which is their birthday + 85 years. Regardless of whether they actually are still alive past that date.

This can't work: life expectancy (of humans) can differ more than 30 years around the world, plus there are significant differences between men and women, and corporations - which often own copyright on work for hire - can live in perpetuity.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#398

Post by juancn »

I dunno.

It's sad in a romantic kinda way, because of the lost artifact, but the information is what makes the book valuable, not really the medium.

The out of copyright books don't really need to be destroyed anyway for them to be fair use for AI training, and arguable, even if you needed to, you only need one copy per title per company at most.

So it's not a gigantic loss.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#399

Post by awinter-py »

dwohnitmok wrote: post #176
vessenes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the last great near-term predictor. I often wish he'd written more. To remind us all, he predicted shred and scan would be a short stop over done by villains on the way to nondestructive scanning. That said, supporting Anna's archive is one of the best things you could do for humanity long term in my opinion.

Vinge also coined the term "the Singularity" ( https://accelerating.org/articles/comingtechsingularity ) what he describes as "an opaque wall across the future" once superhuman artificial intelligence comes on the scene.

he didn't? stan ulam credits 'singularity' to von neumann

vinge wrote his singularity piece in the 80s I believe

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#400

Post by adamddev1 »

juancn wrote: post #398

I dunno. It's sad in a romantic kinda way, because of the lost artifact, but the information is what makes the book valuable, not really the medium. The out of copyright books don't really need to be destroyed anyway for them to be fair use for AI training, and arguable, even if you needed to, you only need one copy per title per company at most. So it's not a gigantic loss.

But is the information really scanned and preserved for direct access? Or is it just trained into an LLM so that we can only get fuzzy answers about the information?
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