It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com
It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
1–10 of 100 posts
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#2Original full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#3This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books.
For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such.
But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#4Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#5This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books. For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such. But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.
Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business.
There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#6The 404 Media report referenced in the article was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
“We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” (404media.co)
164 points | 3 days ago | 321 comments
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#7Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
Courts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#8This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books. For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such. But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.
Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business. There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
Bullshit...they aren't sharing them with the internet archive, and at least the inventory of the defunct bookstore might have ended up with a collector or something. These slop factories have a less sound business model than any given bookstore, and you think they'll preserve those scans and share them with the world? Corporations regularly delete media for utterly capricious reasons.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#9> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
It does though. A lot of people seem to think "it's a book!!!" means it takes on some mystical intrinsic value. That's bullshit. There's an absolute mountain of worthless and near-worthless books. I bet the vast vast majority of these books are those books - after all that's what Amazon wants. A ton of human written text as easily as possible. They obviously aren't buying first editions of Oliver Twist, or even second editions of Harry Potter.
> We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked
Yeah... because then it would reveal how unimportant they are. This sort of outrage inflation is counter-productive. People see through it, lose trust, and then when something bad actually happens they won't believe you.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#10This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books. For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such. But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.
Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business. There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
If they were sharing the scans it would be great but they’re not.