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

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 9:42 AM UTC

ralferoo wrote: post #260

scarmig wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dumpsters also don't typically come equipped with a robot scanner and network uplink built in. Like, I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. They don't get sent to some magical library in the countryside if unpurchased where they are carefully maintained forever (next to where Rover spends the rest of his days). They are very literally thrown into the trash.…

> I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. In the UK at least, people usually take them to a second hand / charity shop, who sort through them and send the valuable ones to auction (typically early editions, 100+ years old) and then either sell them themselves (for recent books that are easy to get rid of) or sell them to specialised second-hand bookshops. Mo…

Post by theshrike79 » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 9:48 AM UTC

skeledrew wrote: post #164

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.

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 9:53 AM UTC

dukeyukey wrote: post #184

mslt wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might as well grind up the tablet of complaint to Ea-nāṣir and make cement out it, right? What use could there be in preserving the mundane facets of everyday existence?

It's more that, we don't need to preserve a million copies of the same mundane book. Losing a few copies to AI training is fine.

Post by Joel_Mckay » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 10:22 AM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #262

finn888 wrote: post #237

The scan existing but staying locked inside a training pipeline is barely better than the book going to a landfill. At least make the raw scans available.

Lossily stuffing books into a model through a training process has so far been deemed legal. Enabling piracy by giving away digital copies is not. The internet archive tried to give away digital copies and they got sued to hell and back (which they should've seen coming from miles away). I'm sure they have some repository available somewhere. They can even sell the digital copies down the line if they're done with th…

Post by customguy » Fri, Aug 21, 2026, 10:47 AM UTC

hparadiz wrote: post #149

customguy wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

There was a court case where they said that if they copied the books it's not fair use because they didn't own it but if they bought physical copies and then destroyed them then somehow it was fair use because it fell into the niche of personal backups. I forget the details but basically they buy one time prints and destroy them immediately.