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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

#891

Post by pfdietz »

merely-unlikely wrote: post #841
pfdietz wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our local library-connected biannual book sale puts a large dumpster, about the size of an 18-wheel truck trailer, outside the warehouse where the sale is conducted. At the end of the sale it gets filled to the brim with waste inked cellulose, and sits there open in the weather until it's taken away for disposal.

Is that intended as an implicit threat - buy or we trash?

No, it's a demonstration of the lack of value of all that waste. On the last day of the sale (which decreases prices steadily over the several weeks it lasts) you can take a paper grocery store bag, fill it with books, and pay just $1. And yet enough books in the sale, enough to fill a large dumpster, don't even make that cut.

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

#892

Post by s1artibartfast »

avidiax wrote: post #777
anon84873628 wrote: post #757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then at least there would be outrage to drive the passing of the needed legislation which otherwise hasn't come to pass anyway.

Copyright law desperately needs a production requirement or allowance. The copyright owner must make new copies of the work available; the price must be no greater than the original price (not inflation adjusted). And if they fail to do so, anyone may produce copies and escrow the original price (less the cost of production) for collection by the copyright holder. That means that orphan works are effectively in the p…

Every book since 1870 has been required to provide two copies to the US Library of Congress in order to register their copyright.

It keeps about 50% of the books submitted. The other half are donated

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

#893

Post by frm88 »

tptacek wrote: post #649
frm88 wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're trying to imagine rare valuable books and then fantasizing about AI companies destroying them, but what's actually happening here is that AI companies are acquiring, digitizing, and then pulping the instruction manuals to 1983-vintage copy machines. Source? You state that in a tone that implies you have verifiable knowlege of this. All the information I found says that the exact number, titles and authors are…

It's in the 404 story.

It's not. The 404 article states (paraphrase): we're not going to disclose any titles, so where does your information come from. Please provide a link.

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

#894

Post by yipinwong »

alightsoul wrote: post #816
yipinwong wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Dario appeals to feeling, yes. Provide more context if you want a better feedback not whataboutism.

Dario keeps rambling about how China is bad, like the US doesn't do those things itself. That appeals to American exceptionalism which every American is taught in school, it's just not taught explicitly because it's ingrained in the very lifestyle that Americans have

Did I stutter? Have I mentioned anything China? WTF is that from?

You are twisting my words with whataboutism. Stop digressing

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

#895

Post by tptacek »

frm88 wrote: post #893
tptacek wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's in the 404 story.

It's not. The 404 article states (paraphrase): we're not going to disclose any titles, so where does your information come from. Please provide a link.

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...

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

#896

Post by asdfsa32 »

eru wrote: post #885
asdfsa32 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am well aware of the Statistical Value of Life and how it impacts projects. But that is generally used for allocating preventative measures. No road is going to get approved if it is going to result in random deaths by design.

Roads with cars on it do result in random deaths. The preventative measures only prevent deaths that the road itself caused.

Roads do not result in random deaths, drivers, and to a much lesser extent poorly maintained cars do. I know it might sound like a distinction without difference, but when it comes to safety measures, this distinction does matter.

Roads that cause random deaths or are the reason for accidents (whatever by their physical design, control systems, surface coating, or allowed speed) are generally illegal in most places and require strict exemptions for geographically challenging places.

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

#897

Post by rullelito »

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…

You really drank all the Koolaid they had to offer.

Destroying the last copy of a book is OK because you shop for second hand books, and because some private company hold the last digital copy and have no incentive to make sure it survives. Damn..

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

#898

Post by the-mitr »

TFNA wrote: post #715
cladopa wrote: post #343

It is not a big deal. Since the invention of the printing press any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity. By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there ar…

> any important book has been duplicated by thousands, tens of thousands or even million of units. Books in the former USSR display their print runs on the last page. "Important book" is a vague and arbitrary term, but rhere are works in whole fields (e.g. history, archaeology, linguistics, ethography) that any scholar would consider key references, and as few as 100 copies were printed. The shadow libraries have mad…

Our little project endeavours to digitise books from the erstwhile Soviet state which were published in many languages

We have, over the last 15 years, acquired/borrowed from libraries, and scanned a couple of thousand books on all topics of interest. All of them are out of print. Some of the physical copies were have, especially in indicate languages might be some of the few surviving ones

https://mirtitles.org/

https://archive.org/details/@mir-titles

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

#899

Post by inigyou »

jdiff wrote: post #602
inigyou wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But copyright law does, because otherwise you have two copies. This isn't theoretical, AI companies have finished lawsuits about this and this was the ruling.

The ruling was that what they did was within the law, not required by law in every detail. They cannot resell the copies. I saw nothing in that ruling that required their destruction, because it is not required. A person can digitize their own books without destroying the original. So can Anthropic. They are choosing to destroy the books for easier scanning and trying to palm off the blame for it.

The ruling was that training is fair use but still they can't make unauthorised copies to enable training. They had to pay a huge fine for each unauthorised copy. So now they aren't making unauthorised copies.
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