111–120 of 559 posts
We reprint old books after checking out copyrights (for all books, this means pre-1930, but for some (I'd actually say most) it also means ones published up to 1964 and 1973, depending on how the rightsholders did (or didn't) do the renewals). We use a special guillotine type cutter to cut off the binding and then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely in…
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Publishers don't care if rare books get shredded?
And, regrettably, The Archive lent books regardless of physical possession. Publishers had accepted the prior arrangement before The Archive decided to push it, if not explicitly then implicitly by not suing. I'm a believer in The Archive's mission, and I wish they had treated the goodwill they'd accumulated as something worth preserving and not a currency to be spent. It has been stated by many before me: lending bo…
Furthermore, in the discovery for the Internet Archive case, publishers had already found a case where IA had lent out books despite knowing their partner libraries wasn't actually withdrawing loaned-out copies from circulation. The CDL premise was always just a suggestion, and IA would have still lost their case if they hadn't done the National Emergency Library (NEL) stunt or if they'd been sued in another venue that hadn't had the ReDigi case as precedent.
It's important to note that whenever a company decides to sue for copyright, it is often late, because the company is banking infringements up to the 3-year statute of limitations and because building a meritorious case takes time. The lack of a timely lawsuit proves almost nothing about the intent of a publisher with a valid case against you.
The thing is, I don't even think the whole stunt damaged much of the IA's goodwill? I know of a few people who withheld donations to IA, but that was mainly under the assumption that publishers would be getting a billion-dollar damage award that would immediately bankrupt IA and result in it's archives being sold off to Lexis-Nexis or something. The funny thing is, IA wound up settling for a sum so small they had to promise never to reveal it, and the danger is gone, so the only thing people complain about now is just that the NEL stunt maybe pushed them "above the radar" or something.
It's still insane that shredding books for AI training is legal, but this isn't.
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The only issue I see is, how could you tell which are those books?
We manage to do this for endangered wildlife too without anyone counting every single specimen; why shouldn’t we be able to estimate how rare a book is?
Most rare books are rare because no one cared enough about them. Ie most rare books are rubbish.
It pisses me off to reflect that they can sit on works until copyright expires, keeping them out of print. There's no real need for any of these so-called rare books to be rare while they're under copyright.
And related to this, the books that are in print are mostly only in print in the shittiest way. I often see well-made books from the 17th or 18th centuries which are still in good nick. It's ridiculous that in the 21st century, publication standards have fallen to the point where for most works a disposable format is the only type available - where no amount of money could buy a truly decent hardback copy.
If we have to have copyright laws, I'd like to see two changes to them.
When a publisher has no incentive to keep an edition in print, it should be available to any other publisher to print, without compensation to the original publisher, and with renegotiated royalties for the author.
And if the publisher keeps a book in print - but only in bestseller-grade materials, bogroll paper that furrows in any humidity and perfect binding that molts its pages a couple of dry seasons later - and if it refuses to print a durable hardback copy with signatures, good paper and decent print - something that will still be readable in several generations' time - any other publisher keen to have a crack at it should be able to, again without any compensation for the original publisher, though perhaps in this case, with matching royalties for the author.
We reprint old books after checking out copyrights (for all books, this means pre-1930, but for some (I'd actually say most) it also means ones published up to 1964 and 1973, depending on how the rightsholders did (or didn't) do the renewals). We use a special guillotine type cutter to cut off the binding and then store the pages in a sealed plastic bag which goes in the archives; they're stored there indefinitely in…
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I see.. so the various AI companies are in the right on this?
yes. in the sense that they probably wouldnt want to do this but the law forces them to do an extremely dumb thing. they're paying for the books, no shady things going on there. whether the publishers should deserve more than a single copy's worth is a separate question. having the law such that its illegal to scan a book and then keep it, but legal to scan it and destroy it - gg no re there, law people retardmaxxed…
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So if the Mona Lisa is part of a model we can burn it?
If you purchased the Mona Lisa (or some rare book), in this hypothetical, you can burn it.
That’s the whole point because the book shredding is already declared legal.
Librarians were already doing this at scale in a process euphemistically called "weeding": https://www.ala.org/tools/challengesupport/selectionpolicyto...
This is a bizarre comparison. Weeding is the natural process of disposing of less-demand books. Like the rest of us, libraries operate in finite space, so if they want new books, they have to remove ones their users aren't using. Most libraries will try to sell books before disposing of them in any destructive way. What similarities do you see here?
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The archive.org story was more nuanced than that. If I recall correctly the full story was that they used to lend digital versions of books they physically bought and scanned with DRM to enforce a sort of one to one at a time restriction. But during covid archive.org decided to just remove the limit and lend unlimited copies concurrently which started the debacle with the publishers.
> But during covid archive.org decided to just remove the limit and lend unlimited copies concurrently IIRC, this was 100% it. Lending one digital version of one physical asset was likely already a violation copyright. Lending UNLIMITED digital versions of one physical copy was DEFINITELY a blatant violation of copyright.
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I think they are in the legal sense of right, and I think they only discarded the remains of these dissected books because previous rulings (e.g. archive.org's lending practices of digital copies of books they physically owned) gave rise to a situation where destruction bore less legal risk. As for the moral case, I don't have much to say on that, we all have our own lines in that sand.
I would say that especially for books out of copyright, they are unquestionably legally in the right. There is no legal standing for "I like books and it makes me feel squicky when someone disrespects them". Nothing stops you from buying old books and using them as decoupage[1] fodder, using them to start a campfire, or making paper airplanes out of their paper. Moreover, while it is emotionally appealing to some peo…
They could give a copy of the data once to some third party organisation that then seeds it in bittorrent or something like that. Basically, what I want to say is that this doesn't need to be an ongoing obligation for the scanner to be worthwhile for society.