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

annas-archive.gl

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

#271

Post by everyday7732 »

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.

Anna's archive is selling data to AI companies. They're essentially saying "hey, don't sell your books to be scanned by AI companies, scan them yourself, and give us the data, so we can sell it to AI companies."

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

#273

Post by ranit »

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…

> Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than one copy.

The OP article sounds quite opposite though - that AI companies are doing exactly this - destroying books so only they have the scanned content.

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

#274

Post by rpdillon »

alightsoul wrote: post #39
rpdillon wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait: the entire premise of copyright is to prevent someone from publishing a book, and a competitor buys a copy, clones it, and sells copies way cheaper because they don't have to pay the author. Now, in 2026, we're acting like cloning a published book is not technically feasible? That doesn't track. With publishing on-demand, it's easy to imagine a business with digital copies of all these works that they make avai…

This is not a technical problem at all. This is a copyright problem. Anthropic thought it was just a technical problem until they had to pay 1.5 billion after they lost a copyright court case Op means a lot of those books were made before computers were used for that purpose and the publishers and probably authors no longer exist, so there is no digital copy to just reprint, unless someone scans it themselves and pub…

> publishers and probably authors no longer exist

Who is going to claim a copyright violation?

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

#275

Post by joshstrange »

wesleywt wrote: post #210
cm2012 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I dont understand at all what AA is worried about. One copy of a book is no big deal? good will and used book stores throw out a lot more than that.

They are scanning "rare" books. I presume there are not a lot of copies left to throw out.

Rare by whose definition?

I’m not aiming this at you directly by: ISBNs or STFU

Show me which “rare” books they are destroying and _maybe_ I’ll care but so far the pearl-clutching over this leads me to believe it’s people worked up about the idea of destroying (except it’s not destroying, it’s transforming, a fact often ignored) books, books that it’s not clear at all there is any strong demand for.

People want to invoke things like F451 but it doesn’t compare in the slightest. It’s like when people get mad about libraries throwing away or otherwise liquidating books that no one is reading in order to bring in books people want to read. People get all up in arms about that as if a book itself, in isolation, is inherently valuable or worth protecting. It’s not. If no one wants to read it then what value does it have? The impetus is on the people that think the book has value, it’s on them to carry the torch, to preserve what they think is worthy.

It would be like a company going to a yard sale and buying unsold/unwanted items to 3D scan them and destroy them in the process. This isn’t breaking into the Louvre and destroying one-of-a-kind artwork.

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

#276

Post by asdfsa32 »

eru wrote: post #254
asdfsa32 wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your point is understood but the crux of the issue is a bit similar to capital punishment, the argument is that risk of losing even one innocent person or useful book isn't worth taking; specially considering the value created for society as part of such risky undertaking, whatever it is exercising capital punishment or scanning and destroying books.

Whenever you build a highway or a bridge or a power plant, your engineers have to put a money value on human life, or at least the worth of a statistical human life. Just to make ordinary engineering decisions. And refusing to do this exercise just means that you behave as-if you put a really silly number on the value of human life, and probably not consistent between different parts of the project. So I don't quite…

I am well aware of the Statistical Value of Life and how it impacts projects. But that is generally used for allocating preventative measures. No road is going to get approved if it is going to result in random deaths by design.

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

#277

Post by drtgh »

jeroenhd wrote: post #258
asdefghyk wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RE "...Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest...." Why are AI companies forced to shred books?

They want to have a digital copy and the judge ruled they can only keep one copy.

You do not need to shred books to scan them. This only happens if you don't care about preserving the integrity of the books and you want to scan more cheaply.

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

#278

Post by remus »

raincole wrote: post #25
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…

> Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. What? Even if there are no copyright holders, the AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap. Are you expecting the authors/publishers to send digital copies to AI companies directly? Or expecting AI companies to preserve the physical copies indefinitely? Both are not gonna happen, copyrighted or no…

> ...AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap.

There is also a legal element. If they kept the physical copy around after scanning the argument is that they're making copies of the book which puts them on tricky legal ground. By destroying the physical copy they can argue that there is only one version of the book that now exists solely in digital form, so this usage is better protected under fair use.

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

#279

Post by SanjayMehta »

qingcharles wrote: post #193
SanjayMehta wrote: post #65

Google Books was a great resource until the lawyers got involved. I was able to find and download (one screenshot at a time) a rare family history. The author died 100 years ago. The published disappeared 80 years ago. But now Google has locked it behind a limited preview. Google probably has the best collection of high quality scans, followed by the Hathi Trust. None of which are useable by anyone outside of those s…

I agree they're the best currently available , but a lot of their scans are straight garbage and need to be redone.

A garbage scan is better than no book at all. Fortunately the book I needed was a clean scan.

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

#280

Post by SanjayMehta »

userbinator wrote: post #151
SanjayMehta wrote: post #65

Google Books was a great resource until the lawyers got involved. I was able to find and download (one screenshot at a time) a rare family history. The author died 100 years ago. The published disappeared 80 years ago. But now Google has locked it behind a limited preview. Google probably has the best collection of high quality scans, followed by the Hathi Trust. None of which are useable by anyone outside of those s…

Does Anna's Archive have it now? They scrape tons of sources, Google Books and HathiTrust included.

Not that I know of, I did upload the PDF to the original libgen but that particular domain has disappeared now.
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