if they do this you can foresee what else they can do
What else they can do based on this?
AI companies are shredding rare books
551–559 of 559 posts
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#552Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have even less sympathy for IP stealing LLM operators
It's not copying (and hence not stealing) if you destroy the original book. That is where copyright law has brought us
Or that's where its abuse brought us. The law needs to be updated for it, for sure
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#553Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> seemingly moral justifications of an empirically immoral practice How is it empirically immoral? Historically it was one of the best things to have have happened to creative professional in history. Before it writer could make a living by publishing books unless he was independently wealth or had wealthy patrons to support him. > Justifications for copyright are always built on edge cases No they are based on the a…
You're strawmanning, or having difficulty reading.
Whatever my personal opinions about copyright, this whole thread is about copyright set at 2000 years vs 20, so that answers your first 2 points.
For the last one, 'losing value' obviously doesn't mean they can be safely binned, but that the publisher has no return on keeping it in publication. Again, this is what the entire thread is about.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#554Earlier quoted context omitted.
One of the best things about this site is how many people there are on here who are way smarter than me, with much deeper domain knowledge.
Or we just reflexively look stuff up.
I think that we all have varying degrees of The Knack [0].
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#555Earlier quoted context omitted.
The alternative (throwing books away for no good reason) isn't much more reasonable.
It happens on a massive scale, so it's completely reasonable. Books are disposable information delivery vehicles now. Publishers pulp great quantities of unsold books too.
Well, destroying them once they already exist is reasonable, but producing garbage (e.g. great quantities of unsold books) on a "massive scale" is completely unreasonable though.
But that's a larger problem that encompasses single use packaging and all the other plastic garbage we're producing all the time.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#556Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a manual process. More importantly, it's also explicitly illegal. Destructive format-shifting is not. Thank copyright laws.
Why would it be a manual pass? There's only so many DRM schemes, and you can even use your previous generation AI to help with the breaking. > More importantly, it's also explicitly illegal. Agreed!
Again, what's more technically feasible? Setting up a DRM-cracking LLM and manually verifying that it's actually succeeded for each and every DRM scheme you encounter, or just throwing the books in a regular old office scanner and being sure it works without even checking...
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#557Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "article" in question is a tweet. The "rare botanical text" is just an example the author of the tweet made up in order to generate sympathy.
The tweet is about a 404 Media article about the practice. It's linked elsewhere here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49073042
> an 18th century botanical text that there's only 2 copies of in existence.
> books that had little in common, except for the fact that they all had ISBNs. This seller also sells rare books that do not have ISBNs, and none of those were part of the bulk purchases
Wow, that's impressive they had ISBNs in the 18th century.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#558Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s fine as long as you acknowledge that you are breaking the law and infringing the rights of all of the authors of said works who do not want their works disseminated in that way. If you are willing to give a middle finger to the law, sure, the world is your oyster.
I was speaking to access and ease of sharing, enabling our ability to read, that digital has allowed, not my personal habits. Piracy was not the point of my comment. There are tools to remove DRM from digital purchases, and there are legit stores with DRM free files. And, there's always the option of buying a hard copy then downloading a scanned version (or doing it yourself).
> access and ease of sharing
I'm gonna sound argumentative, but what happen if you lose access to computers in general? The thumb drive or hard disk or whatever will just become a magical rock you cannot communicate with.
Honestly, given... recent world developments, I'm starting to doubt the robustness of digital media.
Archive.org has already been under constant assault by copyright holders. Who's to say there won't be something much more authoritarian coming over dealing the final blow?
Bittorrent-like distributed content sharing all have publicly traceable traffic afaik (only exception I'm aware of is torrenting over I2P). Therefore, again, something authoritarian can just walk in and ruin the party.
As for thumbdrives sharing, what if government signed and approved OSes start doing content scanning and DRM enforcement (or whatever excuses) on the OS level? We might be able to just install Linux or whatever now, but what if PCs in the future start doing bootloader locking like smartphones do nowadays? Given the recent age verification political theatre around the world, and whatever super duper secure guard Google is pulling right now on Android, this seems like a much more likely direction the world is heading than I would like to admit. Oh, and AI driving consumer hardware prices way up doesn't help.
Total war nuking us back to pre-computer age... yeah I don't wanna get into this one.
Books don't have this accessibility problem. Granted, preservation and sharing wise, they have their own very real challenges. But as long as you have one on your hand, you can just read it.
Re: AI companies are shredding rare books
#559Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The book clearly and repeatedly makes the point that immersion in ubiquitous computing made the younger generation smarter and quicker than their forebears. Miri was 13 and Juan was, what, 9? Both were depicted as running rings around the older generation, even those who weren't taken out of action like Robert. The form and maybe even the content of electronics in school may echo, sure, but the results sure don't.
No, it doesn't, and no, they weren't. They were depicted as more comfortable and capable with the technology that they'd never known a world without. Some adults weren't able to keep up, but some (most) were. If children had really become fundamentally smarter, the hierarchy of authority would have been upended, and it clearly wasn't. Miri still had to mostly listen to her parents.