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It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com

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Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#21

Post by dirasieb »

sandcat_ wrote: post #12
IshKebab wrote: post #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 boo…

Then why does Amazon want them? Why train an AI on worthless books? 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.

>Then why does Amazon want them?

quantity has a quality of its own

>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.

ask your aunt for the recipe, look it up online with a search engine, ask an LLM by describing how it tastes and the ingredients you remember, this is really not that complicated

>This is cultural violence on a massive scale.

could you be any more dramatic? you're acting like we are actually losing anything when in reality we're gaining from this, you'll just be able to ask the AI for the recipe instead of wasting hours and hours hunting down some old book and ordering it online for an exorbitant amount

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#22

Post by jsrozner »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #4

Copyright 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.

In times of substantial technological change, laws tend to lag substantially behind what is actually needed.

And in times of substantial inequality, they lag yet further.

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#23

Post by voidhorse »

8note wrote: post #16

i dont get it. 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?

It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that isn't the point. The post is trying to argue that the act is not sustainable and needlessly destructive, in pursuit of something that many people believe has limited value or unproven value, which is true.

Not the case here, but it's also important to keep in mind that laws too, can be unjust and immoral. Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#24

Post by jongjong »

SturgeonsLaw wrote: post #11

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.

What we have is not capitalism. There is way too much gate-keeping regulation for it to be called capitalism.

Just like China does not have communism. They have too much free-market activity and private ownership for it to classify as such.

If you look at China and think "That's not communism", just be aware that they may also look at the west and think "That's not capitalism." Both are right. In fact both systems have converged.

China took the better aspects of communism and capitalism. We took some of the worst aspects of both... Except maybe free speech; but people are working hard on removing that one!

It makes sense; China came out of an era of extreme government control which has been reduced over time (compared to what it was before). In the west, government control has been on the way up and we can't even imagine how bad it can get.

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#25

Post by m4rtink »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #4

Copyright 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.

Wasn't copyright law supposed to support creation and propagation of works of art ? Instead, apparently it is A-OK or even encouraged by the same law to destroy books.

That does not make any sense! Really might be high time to scrap it all.

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#26

Post by TechDebtDevin »

8note wrote: post #16

i dont get it. 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?

[dead]

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#27

Post by m4rtink »

tescreal wrote: post #3

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.

It is pure evel and anyone involved in this is a criminal that should be harshly punished. Books are sacred.

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#28

Post by kmeisthax »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #4

Copyright 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.

No, it doesn't. Copyright doesn't care about copies, it cares about copying. If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - then ReDigi and the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal. Destroying a copy does not give you permission to create a replacement copy.

The only relevant case law for AI training in the US is the rulings in the Anthropic lawsuit presided over by Judge Alsup. That lawsuit ruled that it's infringement to build a shadow library from pirated books; but NOT to train AI on those pirated books. The only point where destructive book scanning even comes into play is that Anthropic also had a book scanning program alongside their piracy, Judge Alsup said that program was not infringing, and Anthropic happened to be destroying books. At no point did Alsup say that leaving the books whole would have infringed copyright - it was never even considered as it was outside the scope of the lawsuit.

Now, if Anthropic were to non-destructively scan books, store them in a library, and sell the books on, that could be infringing. All the case law about format shifting presumes the owner retains the original. So Anthropic would likely have to hold onto books, at least the ones they wanted to train on, until they were done training on that book[0]. But they do not have to destroy them permanently. They are destroying these books specifically because it is cheaper to do so than to use, say, the Internet Archive's own custom-built nondestructive scanners.

[0] I am absolutely furious about how much this sounds like "fair use is just an extra license you get when you buy a book", and I would much rather have had Judge Alsup just say AI training is not fair use instead.

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#29

Post by like_any_other »

sebastiennight wrote: post #20
like_any_other wrote: post #13

> 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?

I imagine the argument could go like this. 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, Xe…

In this hypothetical, my grandpa didn't patent this way to cure diabetes (otherwise the company would owe him royalties, assuming the patent hadn't expired).

So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it.

I'm sure people would prefer if Amazon also offered library-like access to the book, but how is it theft? I'm not asking about "any possible logic" - he called it theft.

Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use

#30

Post by [deleted] »

anonymousiam wrote: post #14

It's a win-win-win for Amazon if they destroy the source in the process of scanning it. They get the AI training data, and it's cheaper for them to destroy the book in the process. Destroying the book ensures that it will be more difficult for competitors to scan the same content, thereby increasing the value of the data they've scanned. Lastly, there's a misguided belief among some that it's somehow less of a copyri…

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