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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

#71

Post by brunburnburnbur »

noosphr wrote: post #33
voidhorse wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah but I unironically would love to have a copy of that on my bookshelf. It likely has fantastic illustrations!

This is the whole problem. A lot of people assuming they can speak unilaterally and with authority on what other people value or should find valuable.

It's disgraceful. What happens to the old hacker ethos? I'd never thought I'd see the day when, on a site called hacker news the majority of posters are defending the right of a large corporation to destroy public goods permanently just to be able to charge people more for "intelligence as a service".

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

#72

Post by lmz »

hattmall wrote: post #38
like_any_other wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The physical copy was in private ownership before, otherwise how can they sell it to Amazon?

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

#73

Post by godelski »

areoform wrote: post #31

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…

  > Everyone is impressively short sighted.
Incredibly. Even if we throw ethics aside and look at the strategy it is still myopic. The idea is destroy so others can't get the data too. But this assumes you've done a perfect scan and you have backups. There's no good reason to destroy the books other than myopia.

I'm more than willing to bet that in 5-10 years they'll wish they didn't destroy the books, specifically the rare ones.

To be clear, I'm not trying to condone their behavior. I hate it. But I'm trying to show that even if you had their same ethics it's still dumb. I hope workers are secretly stashing the books away. If you're one of the people in charge of destroying the books, you have a cultural duty to preserve them. I'm willing to bet people will go to great lengths to help you do it secretly so you can continue to keep them safe and keep your job. If you're at Amazon, or any company where this is happening, you have a duty to the world to make efforts to preserve the books. Steal the PDFs and lock them away. Create backups in your company. Tell your bosses you don't think this is right. Don't sit silently while this happens. Silence unfortunately is enabling. Unfortunately silence isn't a passive action

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

#74

Post by ssl-3 »

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…

Right. I understand this kind of analogy.

They're intended to be analogous of reality.

Which real-world company is said to be buying all existing copies of a book, here?

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

#75

Post by roenxi »

areoform wrote: post #31

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…

It is also difficult to see what the legal basis would be for allowing people to read books if Amazon's use isn't fair. If I read a textbook and come up with an algorithm based on it that gets used at scale, is that supposed to be a copyright violation?

The basic point of a book is for people to (a) read it and (b) synthesise it into a comprehensive world model. And people can burn their own books if they want to, they own the thing. The only possible complaint here seems to be the scale and it seems like a big challenge to say that is a problem given that knowledge from books is allowed to be used at scale.

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

#76

Post by rpdillon »

kmeisthax wrote: post #28
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 copy ing . 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 An…

The destruction of the books is mentioned many times, and the overall analysis says this:

> The copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were justified, too, though for a different fair use. The first factor strongly favors this result, and the third favors it, too. The fourth is neutral. Only the second slightly disfavors it. On balance, as the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement not redistributed, this was a fair use.

I do not think the ruling would have gone this way if the books were not destroyed, as many would assert that Anthropic would retain them to sell later, otherwise. The fact that destruction is mentioned so pervasively in the decision suggests it is an important fact to consider.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

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

#77

Post by noosphr »

brunburnburnbur wrote: post #71
noosphr wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Yeah but I unironically would love to have a copy of that on my bookshelf. It likely has fantastic illustrations! This is the whole problem. A lot of people assuming they can speak unilaterally and with authority on what other people value or should find valuable. It's disgraceful. What happens to the old hacker ethos? I'd never thought I'd see the day when, on a site called hacker news the majority of posters are de…

Then go buy it from a rare book dealer.

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

#78

Post by thayne »

areoform wrote: post #31

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…

I want copyright to get enforced against these corporations, because then they would have a reason to use their considerable lobbying power to change copyright law, hopefully in a way that benefits everyone (including things like an open digital library).

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

#79

Post by rpdillon »

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…

> all existing copies of the book

This is not happening. They want the text, nothing more. Depriving others isn't the goal, based on all empirical evidence about their behavior. It's about one each of every ISBN.

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

#80

Post by no-name-here »

kmeisthax wrote: post #28
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 copy ing . 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 An…

> If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - … the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal.

Are you referring to the 2023 ruling? If so, that was filed in 2020 explicitly because the CDL was not limiting the total number of copies in circulation:

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...

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