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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

#781

Post by SideQuark »

ndiddy wrote: post #674
misnome wrote: post #655

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Archive.org was sued for renting one book on an exclusive basis (unless one would return, another wouldn't be able to rent) No, this is what they were doing before, but they explicitly started lending out "unlimited" copies, which is why they got sued.

That's why they got sued, but the suit is mainly over whether controlled digital lending is legal at all rather than their "emergency library". Archive.org lost the case on summary judgment, meaning that they could not come up with a single fair use argument for CDL that the judge found compelling enough to let the case go to trial. The full judgment is here https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.5…

> suit is mainly over whether controlled digital lending is legal at all

No, it was not, even supported by the quotes you pulled. Libraries right now, with publisher blessing, offer all manner of controlled digital lending. The suit was because IA did it buy undercutting the publishers copy rights to that legal market. Had IA simply done what every other library has done to provide controlled digital lending, there would be no suit.

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

#782

Post by impossiblefork »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #634
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…

> Destroying them obviously destroys them You're ignoring that they're also scanning them. Which means that we're one copyright law change + some minor incentives away from making these archives actually useful, vs. the book silently getting destroyed in the bookshop's dumpster because nobody bought it.

They become very non-public datasets though, and it does not preserve the culture the books represent.

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

#783

Post by ForHackernews »

kfrzcode wrote: post #763
qarl2 wrote: post #733

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given all the bad PR around this issue - you'd think they'd do the 10 seconds of examination "is this rare" before putting it in the cutter. I'm genuinely surprised they don't.

I'm surprised you're confident they don't. You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus? Or is it like, technical manuals and incredibly dry almanac content? I think the details actually matter here. I'd love to see a realtime list of these titles being scanned and processed. Then we'd know if anyone actually gives a care. That said I'm willfully…

> You think someone's picking up a first edition Steinbeck and destroying it so it gets into the next training corpus?

I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is. I'd imagine they are dumped with a big crate of old books and an hourly quota they have to rapidly process.

Arguably old technical manuals with limited print runs are even rarer or more valuable to historians. We have lots of copies of Steinbeck, albeit not first editions.

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

#784

Post by tptacek »

svachalek wrote: post #565
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?

Preservation would be cool but what does that have to do with anything? The system is that the remaining copies have private owners and the private owners can do anything they want with them, including sell them or shred them. Most of these owners aren't doing anything particular to preserve them, they're stacked up with 10,000 other TV Guides in a hoarder's moldy basement. Anyone interested in keeping October 1994's…

I don't even think ownership rights are the principal component of this situation. It's true that in a different copyright regime, Anthropic could simply publish an archive of every book they scanned (and I think they likely would do that, if they could). But the primary reason these books get destroyed is that nobody cares about them. Old, rare books are a garbage disposal problem, not a cultural one. To me the most important thing to know about this story is that the AI companies are a tiny, tiny blip in the big picture of what happens to old physical books.

Everybody imagines libraries hoping against hope to get their hands on all these rare books so they can shelve them and preserve them for generations to come. But if you donate a box of old books to a public library, there's a good chance the clerical staff handling that donation is going to roll its eyes and cart the books out to a dumpster. Large public library systems have stopped taking book donations, for this reason. "Bring them to a thrift store" is what they'll tell you.

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

#785

Post by vavos »

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…

I think these type of lies usually come about as a result of a game of broken telephone and things get exaggerated

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

#786

Post by joshstrange »

zahlman wrote: post #768
joshstrange wrote: post #618

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. It's a completely different story from "prior happenings", to which I assume you mean book burning and the like. Pretending they are the same is intellectually lazy.

> Nothing is destroyed, only transformed. What was a physical book is now a digital book. I genuinely don't understand how it's possible for someone to type that out in all sincerity. Have you ever held a physical book?

Have you held a kindle? What does that even mean? I vastly prefer digital books to physical ones. I own many physical books (as well as their ebook equivalent) but the physical books on my shelves are nothing more than art to me, I won't read the physical books because the experience is infinitely better when reading on my (jailbroken) kindle.

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

#787

Post by doctorpangloss »

jacekm wrote: post #660
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…

> The project was met with significant legal challenges from authors and publishers which was eventually overcome I don't think they were overcome. As far as I remember Google couldn't make the books available so they abandoned the project. They possess the scans (if they didn't delete them) but they won't be made public.

The consensus among copyright lawyers is Google lost Authors Guild v Google, but for some reason the media and Wikipedia do not clearly report it that way.

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

#788

Post by shagie »

ndriscoll wrote: post #481
leonidasrup wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A small change in the copyright law would fix this problem. Something like: If a company is scanning material protected by copyright, it has to send a digital copy of the scanned material to Library of Congress within 5 working days.

Wrong end of the pipeline; we should instead demand digital copies of media be sent to the Library of Congress in order to obtain copyright, along with a registration fee to pay for indefinite storage and other costs. Registration should be mandatory if you want copyright. For things like books where a machine readable text format existed, it should be mandatory to include (so no requiring OCR). Access to the archive…

That's already the case, though the "digital rather than physical" as a preference could be something that legislation would improve.

https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/

> All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the Copyright Act (section 407 of Title 17).

> This law requires two copies of each work published in the United States be deposited with the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress. Usually, deposited copies must be the “best edition” of the work, which means they must conform to the Library of Congress’s preferred specifications.

----

> Acceptable Formats for Deposit of Electronic Works

> The deposit of electronic works is arranged with the Acquisitions & Deposits division.

> For electronic-only works, submit the best edition in accordance with the formats listed in the “Electronic-Only Works Published in the United States and Available Only Online” section of the Best Edition Statement (PDF, 135 KB).

> For works subject to a grant of special relief, unless otherwise specified, the Library will accept an appropriate “preferred” format listed on the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement. Such files must contain no measures (such as digital rights management [DRM] technologies or encryption) that control access to or prevent use of the digital work.

> For more information about electronic deposit, see the above FAQ “When can I make an electronic deposit of a work?”

---

> When can I make an electronic deposit of a work?

> Works may be deposited in a physical format in accordance with the Best Edition Statement, which can be found in Best Edition of Published Copyrighted Works for the Collections of the Library of Congress (Circular 7B) (PDF, 135 KB).

> Works may be deposited electronically in certain circumstances:

> The Copyright Office issues a written demand for an electronic-only book or serial. If your work is published only online and the Office sends you a written demand for mandatory deposit of the work, you must deposit the work electronically.

> The Copyright Office offers you electronic deposit as an alternative to depositing a physical copy of the work. If you receive a letter offering special relief to deposit a work in an electronic format instead of sending physical copies, follow the instructions in the letter or agreement.

---

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/text.html

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

#789

Post by toephu2 »

himinlomax wrote: post #426
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…

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

I've heard people say this, but I haven't seen any evidence for it. Do you have any evidence?

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

#790

Post by ronsor »

fastball wrote: post #752

So we don't want companies to buy books and scan them and do whatever they want afterwards, but we also don't want to allow piracy of digital copies (the $1.5B Anthropic settlement)? Bit of a rock and a hard place for them.

They want AI companies to shut down.

Unfortunately, "we simply want you to not exist" is not realistically actionable or even compatible with a free society.

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