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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

#621

Post by hypendev »

RIMR wrote: post #496
hypendev wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

No, they are not. A lot of them are rotting and get thrown or given at the end of the day.

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

#622

Post by fluoridation »

margalabargala wrote: post #599
fluoridation wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have the book, you have someone else's interpretation of the book's contents, re-expressed into a language you can read. Both steps can involve a loss or distortion of information, either because the translator doesn't fully grasp the original language or context, or because in the re-expression they chose to leave out details that were relevant to you. The more distant the original language to yours, the m…

That sounds to me like fuzzily having a version of the book. That is, it's more like having the book, than having nothing would be. You seem to be arguing that a translation, etc is not literally having the book, which is something that has always been my stance as well.

You're trying to use the Socratic method to show that the havingness of the book is a spectrum, and I'm taking the position of a hardliner who considers that "having the book" means having the original string of symbols from beginning to end, and anything besides that is not having the book. I'm trying to show you that your line of argumentation is uncompelling to such a person.

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

#623

Post by JohnFen »

brainwad wrote: post #499
JohnFen wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> Let us not forget they own the books.

That's rather beside the point. I don't think anyone is arguing that what they're doing is in some way illegal.

> no modern book

I'm less concerned about modern books.

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

#624

Post by odyssey7 »

Big AI companies are leaving an easy opportunity on the table for establishing goodwill with the public.

Just publicize a rare books vault where you put the older editions that aren’t in a lot of library catalogs. Use non-destructive scanning for those.

Align yourself with the image of safeguarding something. It seems like a no-brainer given various themes I’ve been hearing in criticisms of these companies.

Maybe the hope was to just bury the book destruction under the rug, but the cat is out of the bag. Publicizing a state-of-the-art rare books preservation archive is now a good move.

Tech tends to love associating itself with a classical tradition or something. Name it after the library of Alexandria. It would be a huge cultural loss if that were to burn down again. Thank God for our big AI companies that keep the archive intact.

Actually, I assume it would be separate archives, since I assume there’s a something of an arms race in getting training data that competitors don’t have, but really, who would complain that there are multiple archives? That sounds like a good thing. And what big AI company would want to be the odd one out for not running an archive?

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

#625

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

ivell wrote: post #152
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a whole legal saga here that is often misunderstood. Googling "Project Panama" should give more information. The legal ruling from Judge William Alsup declared that if AI companies purchased the books legally and then copied them to their servers, it was fair use as a "transformative" operation, but the originals had to be destroyed in that case, because then there was only one copy still in existence (the o…

Can they keep backup of the digital copy?

It's a good question.

This site, https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai..., states "It is important to note that this exception for backup copies only applies to computer programs and not to other copyrighted works, such as digital movies, music, or photographs or ebooks." But it seems unbelievable to me that they would have spent millions copying all these books and not have backups.

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

#626

Post by dd8601fn »

andsoitis wrote: post #522
dd8601fn wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think any of these people know. All I’ve read, as far as sources go, is a number of rare book sellers saying they’ve had a big uptick in huge orders with no price haggling. Apparently that’s peculiar. And some of them seemed a little concerned. Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince. And I don’t have any reason to think so…

> Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince. Then they should list the names of these books otherwise I say they're alarmist.

If they have, I haven’t seen it.

It’s very possible I’ve just missed deeper reporting, obviously.

But otherwise I agree. I’m neither losing sleep over it or just trusting that these (historically kinda scummy) businesses are actually behaving.

If there’s a serious problem I’d like to see something more concrete. Same for hand-waving the question.

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

#627

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

Many countries require a copy of each book published there to be submitted to their national archives/library. The US has had this requirement since 1790 as far as I can tell.

All countries I checked (Germany, France, Canada) seem to have similar requirements. WIPO claims that this is the case in the majority of countries (https://www.wipo.int/documents/d/copyright/docs-en-registrat...).

Thus, most books should not be at risk of getting permanently lost due to these practices.

This is Anna's Archive (ab)using a current controversy (which I think is based around emotional appeals and distorted facts to create outrage over a non-issue) to tongue-in-cheek advertise their open pirate library.

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

#629

Post by toomuchtodo »

thread_id wrote: post #494

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 a…

Internet Archive version: https://openlibrary.org/

Info on where to send books not yet in their collection: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

Mobile apps to determine if they need a book: https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a...

Web app: https://archive.org/want/?mode=donation_book

For example, I donated a copy of Systems Bible (out of print, hard to find imho) and paid for it to jump the digitization queue (https://archive.org/details/systemsbiblebegi0000gall/). The original book will remain stored as a physical backup. It's not fully publicly available of course due to copyright (it will eventually be made public by the Internet Archive once its copyright expires ~2084 and it enters the public domain), which is where shadow libraries|archives like Anna's Archive and Z-Library fill the gap.

If you have rare books you would like digitized, archived, and distributed, I am very interested in providing assistance.

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

#630

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

srj wrote: post #416
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.

Why are the companies legally required to shred the books? That's the most surprising part about this to me. Surely if they bought them second hand they could donate or resell after scanning. I'm wondering if the scanning machines are damaging the books.

The legal idea behind it is that if you "copy" the book it's bad because now there are two copies and you "stole" from the author, but if you "move" the book to a digital form (and don't copy that outside of your organization), it's fine.

Given that they have to destroy them anyway, they're obviously also going to use the much cheaper destructive scanning (cutting off the spine and using a feed scanner rather than carefully turning page by page).

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