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AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

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Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#161

Post by scarmig »

Ekaros wrote: post #155
scarmig wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The magical library in the countryside, to be painfully explicit, does not exist.

And they should not even be needed. In many places the issue is solved at start. Copy or copies of each commercially produced book is send to national library. Which with tax payer money keeps an archive. Meaning that at least one copy exist for research purposes if needed.

Unfortunately, that's not the case in the United States. The LOC only selects around half of published books to be permanently held. The rest are disposed of (usually returning them to the publisher, donating them to a library, or destroying them).

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#162

Post by throwaway219450 »

card_zero wrote: post #69
enraged_camel wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, a lot of these "rare books" are stuff like TV programming magazines from October 1994.

So, have you tried finding out what the programming was in October 1994? Or what cultural ephemera appeared in the TV guides of that era alongside the schedules? Either there's a copy for the week you want in an archive, or somebody's got one for sale, or most often neither. This can piss you off, if as it happened you had a reason to care.

The BBC has both in some cases, but we know for sure what was broadcast when:

https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/about

Historic TV guides are also the sort of strange ephemera that people collect. They ought to be digitized like newspapers and other magazines, but this was always the purview of libraries anyway.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#163

Post by skeledrew »

Maybe begging the question here. If a physical book is rare, doesn't that mean it wasn't available to many in the first place? It seems to me providing its knowledge via LLM, even if it's a private company, benefits more people than if it were sitting in a library somewhere maybe read by a few, or worse in some private collector's set.

I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be outraged at AI companies and scan books now. What about before when they were still mostly locked away from the world? It's only when they're actually being made available to - at least a part of - the broader world that they're a "cultural heritage" worth preserving. Shame.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#164

Post by skeledrew »

sieve wrote: post #143

Physical books and digital content is special in that you can mostly archive their content almost permanently for cheap. Buildings, paintings, idols, living things, natural features of the environment ... not so much. So the solution is: - mandatory copyright registration and renewal with links to where the work can be acquired - a blanket carve out for any non-commercial trust-style org so that they can scan books e…

> copyright

This is what caused the problem in the first place. If people had unrestricted access to content then the world would be a better place. And works wouldn't be so rare that it's worth AI companies buying and destroying them to gain some edge, as well as remain in legal compliance.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#165

Post by [deleted] »

skeledrew wrote: post #163

Maybe begging the question here. If a physical book is rare, doesn't that mean it wasn't available to many in the first place? It seems to me providing its knowledge via LLM, even if it's a private company, benefits more people than if it were sitting in a library somewhere maybe read by a few, or worse in some private collector's set. I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be…

[deleted]

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#166

Post by [deleted] »

silcoon wrote: post #87

As much as I hate piracy in a sector in financial crisis like book publishing (because Anna’s project is piracy), I hate even more what these large AI companies are doing: privatizing human knowledge. On one side, there’s copyright law, which exists to support the work of creative people. “Information wants to be free” is bullshit spread by people who have never spent a minute in their lives trying to create somethin…

[deleted]

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#167

Post by guax »

skeledrew wrote: post #163

Maybe begging the question here. If a physical book is rare, doesn't that mean it wasn't available to many in the first place? It seems to me providing its knowledge via LLM, even if it's a private company, benefits more people than if it were sitting in a library somewhere maybe read by a few, or worse in some private collector's set. I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be…

I think is the scanning for profit and destroying them in the process that angries people.

If they we’re just kept where they were you can always say they’ll eventually be scanned or have that potential.

I do believe the issue is a bit overblown but the core of it sounds reasonable to me.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#168

Post by Ekaros »

imperfect_light wrote: post #153

People keep repeating the "rare books" without providing any evidence that they are rare. Anyone who has collected books knows there are massive volumes of old books that can be bought by the pound.

I feel they are thinking first printing of some mega classic or hand drawn book from antiquity. I am thinking of some generic romance or thriller from no name author bought at airport... Or some generic book on say birds or animals... Stuff that they would not take if given a full box for free.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#169

Post by skeledrew »

customguy wrote: post #145
ezfe wrote: post #2

I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…

> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.

They do it because, for each work, they bought one copy, which they scan and no longer need the physical version of, and would be in copyright violation if they keep more copies than they bought.

Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late

#170

Post by tene80i »

HedonicEscal8r wrote: post #11

The piracy organizations are playing 4D chess while everyone else is playing checkers. The irony of this entire situation - AI companies being legally required to shred books due to kafkaesque copyright laws, then used as a marketing tactic by Anna's Archive - is a work of art. I support Anna's Archive, by the way. Information wants to be free.

Plenty of written works aren’t “information” but rather art. Most piracy is just about people preferring not to pay for novels, TV and film.
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