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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

#491

Post by altcognito »

knowaveragejoe wrote: post #121
altcognito wrote: post #66

What evidence do we have that they are "destroying" books? I'm not saying this in their defense, but as someone who has worked at companies who has scanned books at scale, and generally speaking, I wasn't on site there, but I knew we/they were pretty delicate with the books. And while the kneejerk reaction might be "hey, why would they go through the effort?" -- my guess is that they are following or even hiring peop…

Yes, we know they're destroying the books. Whether this is actually a problem or another convenient "AI bad" trope remains to be seen. https://www.techbrew.com/stories/2026/01/28/anthropic-ai-boo...

Thank you! I wanted something beyond an article, but this was a perfect launching point for getting to the court case information:

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69058235/554/21/bartz-v...

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

#492

Post by impossiblefork »

skeledrew wrote: post #365
impossiblefork wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In order to read them, presumably. Just because they are for sale doesn't mean that no one else would have bought them. Destroying them obviously destroys them, which obviously destroys culture. After all, if the books is destroyed, it will not be read. Think of it like this. If I buy an island, and there are bunch of people who live on it, maybe they're day laborers or whatever, is it right for me to expel them, if…

You can't compare an island or food to books though, because the former are only really valuable in their atomic form. Like if you take detailed pictures, people can't live on or eat those pictures. You scan books though and all the value they provide is still fully available in bit form, because books merely contain information. And of course being in bit form means they can be trivially copied, technically. But the…

It's culture. These scans are of course not distributed, so the value doesn't quite continue to exist.

You say "culture", but is is culture, and culture that was interesting enough to write down. Writing a book in the 70s isn't a trivial thing, there are gatekeepers, editors, publishers etc., even for your little book about local history, and the information is valuable to the community it's about. It affects their internal cultural transmission.

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

#493

Post by shagie »

dqv wrote: post #370
shrubble wrote: post #349

AI companies could certainly release the scans of any book that is no longer covered by copyright in the USA, for free download and get some positive publicity for a change. I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...

The other thing they could be doing is using some of that lobbying money to try to reform copyright law to allow them to release the scans that are still covered. It would likewise earn goodwill from a lot of people.

Copyright law is an implementation of international treaties.

Berne Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention (182 parties)

TRIPS Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement (164 parties - part of WTO)

The United States can't make copyright weaker than what those agreements require without pulling out of the WTO.

The core of copyright law is about who has the right to redistribute a work. If I buy a print of a photograph, scan it and use that as my desktop image... I can do that. I cannot redistribute the scanned image, and if I was to sell the print later I should delete the scanned image.

Note that format shifting is covered under fair use... which is what training is taking place under. However, that doesn't mean that they can release that format shifted content... nor can then re-release the original work if they are retaining the format shifted content.

https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/fair-use-reformatti...

    Under § 106 of the Copyright Law of the United States, the owner of the copyright in a work has the exclusive right to make copies of that work, unless an exception applies. When considering reformatting media, please note that individuals do not have an automatic right to reformat a work from one format to another. In order to legally convert media, your use must fall into one of the following categories:

    you own the copyright in the work,
    you have permission from the owner of the copyright, or
    you have done a fair use analysis and have determined that fair use applies

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

#494

Post by thread_id »

I don't see any mention of Project Ocean - AKA Google books. Before AI they endevoured to digitize books in a massive online library. This inccluded rare and out of print books many which are archived at libraries. Because they had to preserve the books and return them in the condition they received then they created elaborate technology to accomplish this. The project was met with significant legal challenges from authors and publishers which was eventually overcome. The legal precedents that were established from Project Ocean laid the ground work for the process as it exists today. Books from libraries are still being preserved.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/appeals-court-ru...

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

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

#496

Post by RIMR »

hypendev wrote: post #367
ziyadb wrote: post #299

I was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs but rather, is a shared responsibility and mission carried by all of humanity itself as a collective responsibility. Thus, the preservation of this knowledge, its availability, and accessibility are t…

>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge. How tho? Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take t…

Those books at the flea market aren't "rotting", they are available for sale.

You seem perfectly fine living in a world where your flea market is devoid of books.

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

#497

Post by brainwad »

ForHackernews wrote: post #322
brainwad wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the people granted a legal monopoly to print the books will have kept a copy of the masters in order to reprint any lost works. Surely copyright works as intended for the public good and isn't just rent seeking. Surely.

I can't tell if you're making a joke but many (most?) rare books predate the modern copyright regime and the original printing plates are somewhere in a 17th century midden heap.

The books being destroyed are not afaik those sort of books. They are just out of print modern books, that are still under copyright (and hence can't legally be scanned non-destructively).

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

#498

Post by DaSHacka »

TofuLover wrote: post #437
himinlomax wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not destroying rare manuscripts or incunables. They're destroying one (1) copy of a mass-produced item for each AI company. Public libraries destroy millions more yearly as a matter of routine. This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense, and similar with the soviet-aligned moral panic that destroyed the civil nuclear industry 40 years ago.

> This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense What was nonsense about water use?

That AI consumes it at an abnormally high rate, presumably.

The claim never made sense to me either, I can only assume those that regurgitated such claims never worked with HPC or even general datacenters before.

Was recently talking to a (non-technical) friend about this, she was surprised after talking about the "insane water use for AI datacenters" when I responded that open-loop cooling is pretty rare for a datacenter and I've never actually seen it used before, versus closed-loop (or just regular air-based cooling) which has no real noticable water consumption.

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

#499

Post by brainwad »

JohnFen wrote: post #331
brainwad wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's illegal. That's the whole reason they are shredding books in the first place, because copyright law forces them to do stupid things. Google wanted to share the whole of Google Books 15 years ago, too, but they were sued to hell, so now you get a watered down search functionality.

> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things. Baloney. They aren't forced to destroy books. They could leave well enough alone and not scan them to begin with. They're voluntarily choosing to do this.

Let us not forget they own the books. They bought them legally on the open market. Also, no modern book truly is destroyed forever, there are always libraries of record with a copy.

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

#500

Post by diseasedyak »

p-e-w wrote: post #421
dataflow wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did you see they tend to buy all the copies? This comment is the first time I've heard of this.

It’s just another lie of the type these threads tend to be filled with nowadays. Of course they aren’t buying “all copies”, and that wouldn’t even be possible in most cases since such books are usually flea market/attic material and most copies aren’t for sale (or even catalogued) to begin with. I’d be interested to learn who comes up with such lies though. Is it really just random people venting their frustration, o…

It really does seem like an organized operation, given that it's so prevalent and they all seem to be in lockstep with their specious claims.
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