Isn't this part of the plot of Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel)
It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
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Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMHO it's an analogy because it's analogous , otherwise it would be reporting . This is why I would be just as stumped if you asked me for the specific real-world name of the granpa in the analogy. However, the recent headlines have been about "rare" books, of which it can therefore be assumed that few copies remain, and fewer of those (possibly none) would be accessible to the public if they are in the hands of coll…
Destroying some rare books is destroying some rare books. That's a thing that appears may be happening; we can talk about that thing at face-value. No analogs required. Deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book is deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book. That's not a thing that appears to be happening; there's no face-value to talk about here, is there? Or are we ju…
Alright then.
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copies of the book, scans it, destroys the original, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Other copies still exist, but they're now marginally harder to find and the corporation gives no credit to the source in their product and marketing.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"?
> Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :)
Sadly, I'm moving and a bunch of those books are going to get turned into pulp as I'm not going to keep lugging them around the world with me for the rest of my life. Where are the Archive guys when I need them?
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
If they were sharing the scans it would be great but they’re not.
They are literally not legally allowed to do this. Google Books tried. They lost. If you want this fixed, talk to your congressman, not Amazon.
Is that really true or are a lot of these books out of copyright?
And if they're not out of copyright why can they train on them without permission?
They probably argue that training is fair use, but if I take a film and compress it with a novel data compression codec and distribute it I'm violating copyright. LLMs are lossy compression for textual information.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it doesn't. Copyright doesn't care about copies, it cares about copy ing . If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - then ReDigi and the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal. Destroying a copy does not give you permission to create a replacement copy. The only relevant case law for AI training in the US is the rulings in the An…
The destruction of the books is mentioned many times, and the overall analysis says this: > The copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were justified, too, though for a different fair use. The first factor strongly favors this result, and the third favors it, too. The fourth is neutral. Only the second slightly disfavors it. On balance, as the purchased print copy was destro…
I read that as "here's a list of reasons why Anthropic isn't usurping the market for copies of these books" and not "destroying a book makes scanning it legal". Non-destructive book scanning wasn't going to come up in this case because it's a hypothetical[0]. Courts don't deal in hypotheticals, so they didn't rule on nondestructive scanning.
Normally, that would mean that the question is still open; Alsup or any other judge would be free to draw the line later. But there is also other Ninth Circuit precedent that explicitly legalizes nondestructive format shifting. If I rip a CD to play it on my phone, I'm not obliged to destroy the CD, but I can't sell the CD until and unless I delete the MP3s. I don't see why books would be different.
EDIT: Also, forgot to mention that Google Books was built with non-destructively scanned books and that was ruled legal too, albeit in the Second Circuit instead of the Ninth.
[0] To be clear, it's a hypothetical because it would be prohibitively expensive at the rate of which AI companies want to ingest pre-AI tokens.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, it doesn't. Copyright doesn't care about copies, it cares about copy ing . If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - then ReDigi and the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal. Destroying a copy does not give you permission to create a replacement copy. The only relevant case law for AI training in the US is the rulings in the An…
> If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - … the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal. Are you referring to the 2023 ruling? If so, that was filed in 2020 explicitly because the CDL was not limiting the total number of copies in circulation: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.53...
The National Emergency Library stunt definitely provoked action from the publishers in that lawsuit, but they were very clear that they did not accept the premise of Controlled Digital Lending. Furthermore, the judge ruled against the CDL scheme in abstract, not just the Internet Archive's flawed[0] implementation of it, because there was already binding precedent against digital first sale in the ReDigi lawsuit.
ReDigi was a company that had built a marketplace for "used MP3s". They wrote software that transferred files in a very specific way - deleting data as it was sent - so that there was never more than one copy in circulation at a time. The courts ruled this scheme was illegal - that deleting a copy on computer A does not permit you to create one on computer B - because copyright cares about the act of copying, not the number of copies in circulation.
Hence why I don't believe Anthropic is actually legally obliged to destroy books. The general principle of the law doesn't support the specific distinction being argued here.
[0] Part of the discovery showed that the Internet Archive had actual knowledge of partner libraries that were not taking books out of circulation and failed to immediately suspend them from the program.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#96I wonder how much of AI is about owning all knowledge, deskilling the masses, reducing access, etc.? The end goal might be actual legit surfdom. Without the means to elevate the people's knowledge (and the companies have already stated they Benevolently Protect Users From Harmful Data™), it quickly becomes a situation where they control all narratives. It took less than a generation for social media to make the spect…
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Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
They've been very clear that these aren't "special" books. Your gotcha isn't a gotcha. And come on. They're not revealing the titles because that would reveal which bookseller they worked with.
Who gets to decide what's "special"? Written works might be personal stories or expression of feeling. I've read a lot of unknown old literature that has little to recommend it as far as literary history goes, but it all has a certain charm, and at the end of the day it was all the work of a human being who walked this earth just like we did and captured their thought on the page. What if their family has an interest…
Mmm, you may have mistaken my point. I'm not an AI-lover and I hate that these companies are doing this.
It would help if I could dig up the quote right now, but the example they gave is that some of these things are like... a walking guide to DC, or something like that. And not necessarily a good one! Many of these were churned out and weren't necessarily even special to the authors.
But they did highlight that beyond the authors, these have a great deal of value to historians, and are really quite important documents in that respect.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#98Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
Courts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.
I had always heard that Google did the 'books' project such that they were waiting for the suit because they legitimately didn't know _who_ to pay in order to achieve their objective in adding more dimensions to their search empire. The copyright law is rooted in the ability to have someone else profit off of reproducing your content. In the Anthropic lawsuit "the plaintiffs did not allege, nor did the record show, that Anthropic’s Claude LLM outputted infringing copies or substantial reproductions of the plaintiffs’ works" (https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/from-bo...).
Destroying your own property is legally allowed. Doing it at scale sucks, but is still allowed. As long as Anthropic et al don't distribute their digital copies then there's nothing legally wrong about what they're doing.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
Destroying some rare books is destroying some rare books. That's a thing that appears may be happening; we can talk about that thing at face-value. No analogs required. Deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book is deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book. That's not a thing that appears to be happening; there's no face-value to talk about here, is there? Or are we ju…
Alright then. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copies of the book, scans it, destroys the original, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Other copies still exist, but they're now marginally harder to find an…
> Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"?
I can't answer that as-asked. I am but one person; I do not represent anyone but myself and I'm not about to pretend to know what others may or may not think.
But I will say that no, I do not consider this scenario to be theft. Nobody was stolen from. A physical item was purchased from another party, and the new owner of that item did what they wanted with it.
If you or I or Corporation A buy one of these rare books and use it as toilet paper, or to cut up and make little paper boats out of, then: Still no theft.
Furthermore, maybe I buy your grandfather's rare book from a yard sale and use it to learn about the amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Or I borrow a copy from the library. Either way: The book is legitimately in my hands and I'm reading it. I'm learning from it.
I integrate that method (your grandfather's method!) into my little pea-sized brain's model of life, the universe, and everything.
And then: I write about the method I learned about. Maybe I publish a zillion copies and scatter them as leaflets that blanket the Earth, or I make one single-copy gilded print that I sell for a zillion dollars, or I set the scribes forth at dawn to duplicate it onto scrolls of Charmin to use as toilet paper.
That's still not theft.
In terms of copyright (which is also not an issue of theft): Copyright doesn't protect ideas. Perhaps it should, but it does not.
Re: It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alright then. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copies of the book, scans it, destroys the original, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Other copies still exist, but they're now marginally harder to find an…
> Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"? I can't answer that as-asked. I am but one person; I do not represent anyone but myself and I'm not about to pretend to know what others may or may not think. But I will say that no, I do not consider this scenario to be theft. Nobody was stolen from. A physical item was purchased…
I appreciate you articulating this viewpoint in more detail, and I understand it better now. Thanks.