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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

#31

Post by areoform »

I think this is impressive backwards reasoning.

Before my lifetime, copyright law all but choked and killed the public domain. And now everything is stale and the same.

This particular battle was lost with Google Books and the attempt to make the world's largest library. The modern library of Alexandria.

But then copyright lawyers got involved to get their pound of flesh. And here we are.

I am upset about the destruction of knowledge. Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago. I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them.

Everyone is impressively short sighted.

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

#32

Post by voidhorse »

dirasieb wrote: post #21
sandcat_ wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are we gaining other than your silly little hypothetical?

The whole problem here is:

- Not everyone agrees on the utility / value of AI. - A small handful of companies control frontier models and get to shape how these inputs are ultimately put to use. - As Sam Altman put it, they want to charge you, in perpetuity, for "intelligence" as a service. Contrarily, anyone can access a book usually for a one time purchase fee and read it forever. You'll be paying per token to look up auntie's recipe every time instead of just, you know, reading the book.

Not to mention you are erasing the voices of human beings who had lives and may have related their experiences and emotions in those texts. That anyone would be comfortable with a corporation they know nothing about destroying potentially unique information of the lives and stories of real human beings, locking it away forever as one granular component of a stochastic content generator, the human expression in its actual form never to be accessed again, is absolutely appalling to me.

I think you should reflect more on who will really benefit, who has the control, and why humanity as a collective is potentially losing as collateral, without having much say about it.

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

#33

Post by noosphr »

voidhorse wrote: post #23
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, w…

These are books that no one else wants and would get pulped otherwise. No one has space to save the 1754 edition of "whale blubber cookery on the open seas".

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

#34

Post by noosphr »

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?

AI psychosis cuts both ways.

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

#35

Post by IshKebab »

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.

Oh no, some hypothetical person can't find a mediocre cookbook from 20 years ago. Amazon stop!!

Do you even hear yourself?

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

#36

Post by ronsor »

voidhorse wrote: post #23
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, w…

> Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.

So you are saying to abolish copyright?

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

#37

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

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

#38

Post by hattmall »

like_any_other wrote: post #29
sebastiennight wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pref…

Words are subjective. The person is saying that it is theft and if the law doesn't define it as such then the law should change. The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.

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

#39

Post by phyzome »

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…

They've been very clear that these aren't "special" books. Your gotcha isn't a gotcha.

And come on. They're not revealing the titles because that would reveal which bookseller they worked with.

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

#40

Post by left-struck »

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?

Scanning is not the ip theft, it never was.
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