11–20 of 100 posts
These behaviours would be described as obsessive and pathological in any clinical setting, but when they're done for profit it's somehow normal.
> 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 boo…
Individually you might be right. Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
Lastly, there's a misguided belief among some that it's somehow less of a copyright violation if the source is destroyed, but it's a violation either way unless the entity doing the scanning has permission from the copyright holder to make the copy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book.
clearly fair use.
does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? theyre buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy. if you want the books preserved, maybe fund your libraries to get a copy or two?
Getting real sick of capitalism systematically consuming and destroying everything it touches. These behaviours would be described as obsessive and pathological in any clinical setting, but when they're done for profit it's somehow normal.
Wage labor is then the perfect structure to ensure that most resistance from the bottom is suppressed before it can even really start. When you depend on the corporation to succeed for your subsistence (since there is no adequate social safety net to fall back on) taking a principled stance and refusing to destroy great works of literature becomes a highly costly endeavor for most people.
This 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.
> As mentioned elsewhere, this is also IP theft on a massive scale. Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?