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AI companies are shredding rare books
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Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either that or some exponentially increasing tax so that Disney can keep their vault. (I'm perfectly fine with them keeping it if they pay some proper taxes.)
They pay taxes every time that they make money off Mickey Mouse, regardless of copyright status.
Do they? scope out their federal tax liability in 2025.
https://insidethemagic.net/2026/04/new-report-shows-that-the...
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, regrettably, The Archive lent books regardless of physical possession. Publishers had accepted the prior arrangement before The Archive decided to push it, if not explicitly then implicitly by not suing. I'm a believer in The Archive's mission, and I wish they had treated the goodwill they'd accumulated as something worth preserving and not a currency to be spent. It has been stated by many before me: lending bo…
Just to be clear, publishers hadn't accepted the "controlled digital lending" (CDL) premise, not even with the one-to-one ratio. Their position was always "first sale ends when the atoms do". There was even controlling precedent: a few years before IA tried their online lending library thing, there was an "MP3 resale" company called ReDigi that had lost on very similar grounds. The publishers suing IA even made sure…
Sure, that's why I said implicitly.
Publishers will always state a maximalist position but the truth of what they accept is what they tolerate without suing.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I did that I'd seal them with silica gel to keep the humidity down.
I would think this totally dries the pages out and then they just turn to dust, from experience.
My understanding is that the fibers in paper can become brittle if they are too dry. However, this doesn't cause the paper to break down, it just makes it vulnerable to damage if flexed. So storing paper dry is fine if it is then humidified before being stressed.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#485Literally 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 s…
What.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Every company whose original creator dies must be converted into a public company within 20 years of founder's death if public company means employee owned (instead of publicly traded or state owned) then im all for it. if the founders family are good managers they can easily convince their workers to let them keep running things. you dont deserve a job or a fortune just because your parents did a lot of hard work…
What do you mean that's what capitalism is about? It's about capital. It doesn't asks where you get that capital - if you have $100,000 that you inherited vrs $100,000 you earned, JPM will still see it as just $100,000. So yes, by capitalism, if your parents did a lot of hard work and saved the capital and gave it to you, you have it. Where does it make a moral judgement that it's wrong to have inheritance or right t…
To your second point: a company (or any kind of organisation) is continuous work. It's a very obvious retort to your analogy. It would be akin to the author writing a book in a series every year for twenty years, then giving their rights to their child who keeps writing books every year, and every book only has 20 years of copyright. Seems fair to me.
To your first point: inheritance has a concentrating effect on wealth. Concentration of wealth is not a good thing, as it breeds inequality by definition.
If your grandparents gave you a house for free, and you used that enormous advantage to pur your money elsewhere and then own 2, 3 houses, and your child then gets 10, that's 10 houses that people could own themselves, instead of paying the highest rent that your child can get away with.
If you have any experience of poverty, you should understand how viscerally unfair the existence of 'rich kids' seem, and how damaging it is to society.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#487Earlier quoted context omitted.
> if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to scan any physical media. Because there’d be much less content created in any media to capture in the first place.
Empirically, probably not. We had lots and lots of content before copyright, and people seem to produce lots of content even in jurisdictions with weaker copyright.
It's kinda amusing copyright always seems to attract discussions about authors rights. It was never about author or their rights. It was and is a set of rules that allow money to be made by publishing books and songs. Authors have a role in that, but so do publishers.
Turns out most authors and publishers suck at their respective jobs. Most books produced by authors are things nobody wants to read. If a publisher's job is defined to be finding works the public likes, they suck at it too. Instead they just publish lots of stuff, mostly at a loss. They make their money from the occasional hit. But only way they can make money from it is if they have a monopoly over publishing it for a while - which is exactly what copyright gives them. Looked at in another way, this "publish lots of stuff and see what sticks" is the way our society discovers what new works are popular. And copyright funds it.
If you take the view that copyright is paying for the discovery and publishing of new works, then consumers paying monopoly prices for 70 years or more is a bad idea. By far the majority of works are commercially dead 1 year after being published. The publishers tend to make their money from the remaining 1%. They might last five years. Very, very few last 20. I don't see how copyright lasting beyond 20 years can be justified with anything other than: "because of the good work he did 20 years ago, he deserves to be paid for sitting on his arse for the rest of his life". In reality, he didn't sit on his arse - he donated to a few politicians - but the outcome is almost the same.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#488Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would think this totally dries the pages out and then they just turn to dust, from experience.
My understanding is that the fibers in paper can become brittle if they are too dry. However, this doesn't cause the paper to break down, it just makes it vulnerable to damage if flexed. So storing paper dry is fine if it is then humidified before being stressed.
It's possible. My only experience is with vintage newspapers that were allowed to dry out, and then when trying to open them just shatter like a carbonized volcano scroll.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#489Literally 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.
Well, an oracle except for that part in the same book where unlimited access to the internet made all children prodigies self-motivated by their love of learning.
I don't know that that's an accurate description of the circumstances in the books. They were born into a world of ever-present and almost-ubiquitous connectivity, and heavily encouraged to string together modular black boxes to build new things. This didn't make them prodigies, it just kept them from falling behind. They lived in a world where even the physical shape of their schools wasn't stable and reliable.
When you compare to kids learning from home during the pandemic, on Chromebooks and iPads, building TikTok videos with CapCut instead of an actual local NLE application... you can start to hear the echoes.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Well imagine you write a book in your 20s or 30s and it only becomes popular after a couple of decades. The publisher gets to pocket all the money. Somebody decides to make a movie based on your book? You get nothing at all from it... The movie bit would be problematic even for books that were reasonably popular at the time. e.g the Witcher adaption came out almost exactly 20 years after the last book, for GOT it was…
This is an edge case. The vast majority of intellectual output loses value extremely fast. If a new Kafka comes along and their writing becomes popular 30 years after publication, they will have 0 issues getting a fat contract for a new book.
Justifications for copyright are always built on edge cases, seemingly moral justifications of an empirically immoral practice. Yes, it'd be nice if a single handicapped mother of 2 coild see her children rise out of poverty thanks to her writing talent after 50 years. In practice, this person doesn't exist and building society around that scenario is not a good thing.
These 'what ifs' have the same value and do the same damage as 'who will think of the children' do for human rights.