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The whole "copyright infringement is theft" meme seems to have stuck.
20 years ago it was all "information wants to be free" and "infringement is not theft; being deprived of speculative profit is not a loss."
How the turn tables.
There's also a fair use consideration that favors noncommercial use compared to commercial use, but that's not the only question, and the statute doesn't say clearly how to combine the fair use factors.
But it's possible under the Copyright Act that some commercial uses of copyrighted works could be considered fair uses while some noncommercial uses could simultaneously not be considered fair uses.
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 destruc…
Most paper books don’t make it a thousand years, let alone a hundred. Your local library is probably purging piles of books every year and nobody sheds a tear.
> 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
It would be cheaper to buy a second copy of the book and put it in a different warehouse where it can continue to go unread as it did before the AI companies bought it. The cost of non-destructive scanning and rebinding books is crazy high.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
Just like with most things, LLM's are terrible at recipes if you are actually a good cook. Your example is very flawed because if the LLM gave you the exact recipe then it would be infringement, but many recipes need to be exact. LLMs aggregate information so wanting a very specific recipe (to the point of hunting down an old cookbook) is a non-starter because it the LLM is really only guessing.
If you write: "Smash one egg into that bowl and feel the power. Sprinkle salt onto it salt bae style." That's copyrighted and I can't copy that word for word.
But I can publish my own recipe which is an exact copy of yours but written like so:
Ingredients: 1 egg 1 teaspoon salt
Method: Combine egg and salt.
Or write that in any way I want that isn't a word for word copy of your recipe.
At any rate, I ought to pick it up again and finish reading it...
Everyone turning into Metallica. The whole "copyright infringement is theft" meme seems to have stuck. 20 years ago it was all "information wants to be free" and "infringement is not theft; being deprived of speculative profit is not a loss." How the turn tables.
"Information wants to be free as long as I benefit from not paying."
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.
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.
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 destruc…
AI content is not exactly helping everything feeling like Extruded Product.
> 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…
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?