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AI companies are shredding rare books

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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#411

Post by qwytw »

monknomo wrote: post #300
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…

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.

For corporations sure. For individual authors that's certainly not fair. Especially since it makes it easier for corporations to exploit their work without paying them anything.

> If it's good enough for patents, I don't see why it isn't good enough for copyrights

Because there are fundamentally differ concepts and serve different purposes?

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#412

Post by RIMR »

D13Fd wrote: post #61
Springtime wrote: post #48

It seems a key contention of theirs is the possibility that rare books are being destroyed this way, yet the things they cite don't seem to suggest this (based on their paraphrasing), they just throw the following at the end to make it seem like it's occurring to irreplaceable books: > You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge s…

There is zero reason to shred 18th century books. Any such books are out of copyright.

Yes, that is what the person you are responding to is saying. That's why they are questioning the assumption that this practice extends to 18th-century books that are solidly in the public domain.

If it is happening, it is an outrage. However, the 404 article doesn't actually provide any evidence of this; it just connects the shredding of digitized books and the digitizing of rare books to the assumed shredding of rare books, which isn't necessarily happening.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#413

Post by qwytw »

xienze wrote: post #286
bscphil wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did Anthropic settle with authors for 1.5 billion then? Surely their lawyers must have decided there's a pretty good chance of judges ultimately deciding that it is copyright infringement?

You could also ask why the other side agreed to that settlement. It's not a one-way street.

It was about piracy, though? Not fair use.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#414

Post by RIMR »

karahime wrote: post #244
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.

Well, AI and Copyright are both related things that people created, so it's certainly relevant. I don't think the person you're responding to misspoke.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#415

Post by qingcharles »

soco wrote: post #74
mc32 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old rare books where there are single digit copies should enjoy some sort of patrimonial protection just like museum pieces. You can own them but have the state have the option to buy it if you’re about to significantly deface it or destroy it.

The only issue I see is, how could you tell which are those books?

You can't, without spending a fortune to investigate the scarcity of some of the titles. I do a little work in this space and I don't know of anything destructively scanned that has zero other copies, but definitely some with single digit known copies, where no previous scan exists. Now there is one less physical copy, but a digital copy that none of us can access (except by tricking an LLM).

It's not just the big players buying up these archives, either. There are a lot of smaller players, especially in the OCR space, who are buying up huge swathes of works in languages which have much smaller digital footprints, e.g. Arabic.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#417

Post by qwytw »

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?

> the marginal value that the next buyer would buy

Well the argument is that they should pay for the right to produce derivative works not for the physical copy.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#418

Post by nobodyandproud »

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…

I agree. However, AI companies have managed to make publishers and copyright owners saints by comparison.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#419

Post by timmmmmmay »

Cynddl wrote: post #12
thechao wrote: post #4

Which book that was rare was destroyed? I'm interested to know a few titles.

The 404media article mentions notably https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi... which says: > The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik…

so... not rare, then? another fear mongering article lying to everyone.

Re: AI companies are shredding rare books

#420

Post by qwytw »

Minor49er wrote: post #217
soco wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be me but I fail to see the equivalence of AI companies with thirst deaths. That', or maybe because it's a strawman.

The point is that you can buy a book for a few bucks, read it, and have its insights completely available to you. But people are demanding that LLM companies pay far more to publishers for the same copies

You can also buy a book produce a large number of copies after jumbling around some chapters sell it to other people. That's illegal to do if you are person but not if you an AI company.

I suppose an argument might be made for fair use if they released their model weights publicly without financially profiting from it.

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