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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

#81

Post by sandcat_ »

markdown wrote: post #47
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.

I've been looking for a recipe book that my mother used to own called "Taste of the Tropics". Every few years I search online, and while I find a listing from time to time, it's always been "Currently unavailable". I just searched again now and found 3 used copies on AbeBooks for about US$11 incl. shipping. Absolutely made my day. I don't know if adult me will enjoy it beyond the nostalgia, but there's a coconut cake…

Thanks for sharing. My comment clearly struck a bit of a nerve amongst some and resulted in some mildly nasty responses, at least by HN standards. Admittedly it was one of my more heated takes, too. But it was worth it for your anecdote. Enjoy the coconut cake.

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

#82

Post by sebastiennight »

ssl-3 wrote: post #74
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…

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?

IMHO it's an analogy because it's analogous, otherwise it would be reporting. This is why I would be just as stumped if you asked me for the specific real-world name of the granpa in the analogy.

However, the recent headlines have been about "rare" books, of which it can therefore be assumed that few copies remain, and fewer of those (possibly none) would be accessible to the public if they are in the hands of collectors or long-time buyers.

As an author, I know some of my own books didn't sell and probably exist by now in small enough quantities that if you destroyed the boxes in my apartment, and bought the last single copy still available used on Amazon, nobody's ever getting their hands on the other few that might be surviving in a couple of basements here and there.

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

#83

Post by ssl-3 »

sebastiennight wrote: post #82
ssl-3 wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

IMHO it's an analogy because it's analogous , otherwise it would be reporting . This is why I would be just as stumped if you asked me for the specific real-world name of the granpa in the analogy. However, the recent headlines have been about "rare" books, of which it can therefore be assumed that few copies remain, and fewer of those (possibly none) would be accessible to the public if they are in the hands of coll…

Destroying some rare books is destroying some rare books. That's a thing that appears may be happening; we can talk about that thing at face-value. No analogs required.

Deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book is deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book. That's not a thing that appears to be happening; there's no face-value to talk about here, is there? Or are we just discussing left-field hypotheticals?

Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :)

As a voluminous writer myself, this is something that I do care about.

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

#84

Post by dirasieb »

hattmall wrote: post #44
dirasieb wrote: post #21

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.

>Just like with most things, LLM's are terrible at recipes if you are actually a good cook.

all the more reason to feed them more training data on how to cook, for example cooking books

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

#87

Post by pas »

thayne wrote: post #78
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).

that's not how regulatory capture works. they get some exemption, cross-licencing, or pay a fine, and nothing changes for the better

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

#89

Post by thaumasiotes »

Aurornis wrote: post #53
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…

> Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago 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 rebindi…

Value of the text isn't the biggest obstacle to a paper book surviving for a thousand years. The material isn't that durable. It pretty much only happens in Egypt.

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

#90

Post by voidhorse »

noosphr wrote: post #77
brunburnburnbur wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's not really the point. You are defending the right of a massive corporation, to harvest and systematically and unilaterally make it impossible for people to purchase such books in the future without any oversight, just so they can charge you by meter to access information forever going forward. You are signing on to the potential complete destruction of the only record of their existence some human beings may have left on earth.

I hope it's all worth it when you're paying amazon to generate hallucinations for you that have zero traceability back to the source of information. In the future, you'll have no idea if the LLM is telling you the truth about a particular niche fact about the history of whale blubber cookery, because there will be nowhere to cross check.

Don't be dense.

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