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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

#831

Post by ndriscoll »

shagie wrote: post #827
ndriscoll wrote: post #825

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So? Of all the aggressive things the US forces upon the world (or just unilaterally does, ignoring agreements), undoing its own bad policy would be a drop in the bucket, and would be doing some good for once. I'm sure if we just did it, others would respond tit-for-tat and require registration of our material, and then mission accomplished. (And at the end of the day, sovereign people are never required to do anythin…

I don't believe it is a bad policy that copyright on anything that is copyrightable is automatic (I don't need to register this comment with the Library of Congress). ... And it would require renegotiating the treaty with all of these countries so that AI training is easier. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/treaties/parties/231 ... Or it would require the US to withdraw from the WTO and pass new laws for how copyright…

It's not to make AI training easier; AI training is already happening. It's perfectly easy for them.

It's to preserve our heritage and knowledge. Automatic copyright is what causes information to be lost. I don't suppose you're going to submit your comment to LoC or otherwise keep it available for 70 years after you die? Does everyone remember to submit their code they publish?

We're not losing books because of AI companies. We already lose them because the law makes it so only groups like Anna's Archive can save them.

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

#832

Post by odyssey7 »

RaffaelCH wrote: post #637
odyssey7 wrote: post #624

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…

From what I understand, to work with copyrighted books they need to essentially format shift (i.e., scan and destroy the physical book). So a book vault would not solve this issue. A book vault would still be useful for out-of-copyright works, but this would only cover a (probably relatively small) portion. Also, I'm not sure how easy it is to reliably determine copyright at scale, so they might just decide that it's…

If they’re old enough and rare then copyright is moot, as you mention. The size of the vault is of interest but it’s not something that makes the vault possible vs impossible.

I’m not a lawyer, but I would guess the theory behind the destruction is to guarantee that they are authorized under fair use to have and to use their digital copy. Imagine a situation in which someone else becomes the owner or is using the original. If you destroy it, that becomes impossible. If that’s part of the constraints, then a vault, rather than a library, could be a key distinction.

You might be confusing the need for an original work that draws upon another to be “transformative,” in order to not violate copyright, with the notion of “fair use,” which allows scanning something you own for your own personal use.

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

#833

Post by qarl2 »

ForHackernews wrote: post #783
kfrzcode wrote: post #763

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I doubt the low-paid workers stripping, scanning and shredding the books are checking what anything is.

You don't think they are, at the very least, checking to see if the book has been scanned before?

A search like that could very easily be extended to check for rare books too.

Why do you assume it's not being done?

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

#834

Post by ktm5j »

shagie wrote: post #815
ktm5j wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Questions don't imply anything, you're just asking things. I don't have the answers to your questions, but the point is that Google was able to scan books without destroying them while still avoiding legal consequences (with some effort).

The physical books that were scanned by Google were returned to the libraries. https://btaa.org/library/programs-and-services/book-search/f... > Will scanning harm the books? > No. Google developed innovative technology to scan the content without harming the books. Any book deemed too fragile will not be scanned by Google, but may be treated by expert library staff. Once scanned, all print volumes are returned to th…

> The AI training isn't borrowing from libraries and returning from libraries

Perhaps that's an important distinction here, I was really just trying to explain what I thought the commenter was trying to say. Calm down with the copy pasta walls.

But I still think that AI companies could make a very similar argument to the one Google made in your copy-pasta. The laziness I refereed to earlier is the fact that they haven't even tried. They could donate the books afterwards which would go a long way towards helping that argument in court.

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

#835

Post by tentacleuno »

theshrike79 wrote: post #261
ralferoo wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

So trashed, but with a bunch of extra steps then?

I would presume that the extra steps incrementally diminish the possibility of the book remaining unsold, and thus destroyed or sent elsewhere.

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

#836

Post by merely-unlikely »

ceasesurthinko wrote: post #750
alightsoul wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was due to negligence. Now it is profitable to keep the books private, and actively deny others access to them.

Ah, yes, because we all know OpenAI and Anthropic are famously just front operations for the high-end antiquarian book trade.

High-end antiquarian book traders is a genuinely hilarious way to describe them and I shall refer to them as such henceforth.

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

#837

Post by merely-unlikely »

alightsoul wrote: post #704
Aurornis wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, These comparisons are starting to get ridiculous. Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, that it’s sitting in the warehouse of a bulk book reseller, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy? Your local library throws out books every year and nobody tho…

Does china developing ai powered missiles sound ridiculous? It sounds ridiculous to me because the US is surely doing the same, It would be boring if we knew the us was doing the same. It is emotional to think about china destroying the US when it is just the antithesis of American exceptionalism. It reminds me of what Dario said about their stance on open source.

That doesn't sound ridiculous at all (maybe reductive but not ridiculous). And the US doing the same doesn't make it any less interesting either. In fact the US's use of AI in developing target banks in a recent conflict caused quite a lot of consternation when publicly revealed. Ukraine has also recently used AI enabled autonomous drones to make an entire area one big "kill zone", no humans required. Not so ridiculous or boring if you ask me.

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

#838

Post by economistbob »

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…

[dead]

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

#839

Post by choo-t »

radu_floricica wrote: post #391
nloomans wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers” the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies. > If you go to a recycling centre…

> somewhere were we can't access it By any metric imaginable, it's making the information more accessible, not less. First, it's taking a single copy of a 10k physical print and it's making it digital. Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther. Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to…

> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. Or be useful and scan book for Anna archive and other shadow libraries.

Citizen's lobbying against megacorp is a mirage.

>But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.

By what metric ? The copy is now guarded by a company instead of being on the second hand market.

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

#840

Post by merely-unlikely »

BeetleB wrote: post #517
snickerbockers wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy? Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed? >Your local library throws out books every year and nobody tho…

No. Almost none of the books you donate to the library get to the shelves. If they can sell it, they will. Otherwise they are thrown away. I even read on a web site of a librarian that their library had stopped accepting donations because "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash".

> "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash"

That makes me a lot sadder than AI companies destroying the books but at least preserving (most of) their knowledge.

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