I can imagine 100y from now, most if not all books and knowledge are in electronic format or even just as part of an AI, then a wild solar flare wipes out all electronics in a minute..
Good premise for a scifi novel.
AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
171–180 of 961 posts
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#172Can someone name a rare book that was destroyed as part of AI scanning? I want to know what kind of thing we're losing.
I've read a few of those articles in recent months, both in English and German, and I did read any book title that was rare. The Rare Book & Special Collection Div at the Library Congress considers books published before 1801 as rare. Searching for old books on abebooks is surprisingly hard but I didn't find any for less than 10 Euro and nothing in those articles suggested they were buying up anything but cheap books.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
The hypothetical "heroic figure goes and buys last copy of a 1962 guide to Ford cars to carefully maintain it in an appropriately climate controlled library" is vanishingly unlikely. A ten or a hundred or a thousand times to one, it just goes to the trash. At least here it gets scanned by the AI company.
But that scan is never made available to us in its original form. So it getting scanned by the AI company does nothing to preserve the book.
It was never available to you/us in the original form either.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#174Physical books and digital content is special in that you can mostly archive their content almost permanently for cheap. Buildings, paintings, idols, living things, natural features of the environment ... not so much. So the solution is: - mandatory copyright registration and renewal with links to where the work can be acquired - a blanket carve out for any non-commercial trust-style org so that they can scan books e…
> copyright This is what caused the problem in the first place. If people had unrestricted access to content then the world would be a better place. And works wouldn't be so rare that it's worth AI companies buying and destroying them to gain some edge, as well as remain in legal compliance.
I completely agree. IPR as a concept is suspect. But it is the world we live in, with timelines extending like crazy. There are works produced before I was born that will remain under protection till long after I am dead.
A targeted modification to the laws could produce most of the benefits for a minor cost.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dumpsters also don't typically come equipped with a robot scanner and network uplink built in. Like, I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books. They don't get sent to some magical library in the countryside if unpurchased where they are carefully maintained forever (next to where Rover spends the rest of his days). They are very literally thrown into the trash.…
They're buying the books from resellers, not rescuing these books from dumpsters. Stop being an apologist.
Dumpster is where they go when the resellers fail to complete sales.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#176Earlier quoted context omitted.
The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed. These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.
Quite possibly not many, and no copy held in any form by the copyright owner either. Say a few hundred copies of some obscure book from 40 years ago. They probably won't be erased from the face of the earth by the judicious and proportionate actions of, of a few, AI companies? Hmm.
Many are just copyright "orphans", nobody knows who owns the copyright any longer. Maybe the author died and the copyright passed to their estate, but they're not even aware of it.
One book I'm hunting for a copy of right now was published in England in 1947 and in those days paper was rationed, so not many copies were made, and only a handful have survived. As soon as I find it I'll scan it and upload it to IA.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#177I can imagine 100y from now, most if not all books and knowledge are in electronic format or even just as part of an AI, then a wild solar flare wipes out all electronics in a minute..
Books have been declared dead several times of the last quarter century, yet in the EU alone it's still half a million new titles every year and a 40 billion Euro market.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, but if an AI company buys some vanishingly uncommon book, digitizes it, shreds it, and adds the information it contains to their permanent digital library and digests its contents into an AI that is then publicly accessible...are they making that book less accessible, or more?
Can you get the exact text back out with a prompt or not? Having or not having a book isn't fuzzy.
Funnily the argument made just a few months ago by many rights holders who wanted their pound of flesh was that, if prompted a certain way, exact text could be retrieved.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
But that scan is never made available to us in its original form. So it getting scanned by the AI company does nothing to preserve the book.
...because it is illegal to copy copyrighted material. 70 years later they might do it.
95 years after publication. Many other countries also have an X years after the author's death clause where X varies between countries but is at least 70.
There are also other weird issues such as the UK having a clause protecting Peter Pan (so a children's hospital gets royalties) and the King James translation of the bible (under Crown copyright) that extend the copyright even further.
In short, it's a mess.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#180It would be nice if we have some "tracking" e.g. 30% of all known books are scanned. So far all information I searched in the Internet about the progress has been patchy. It's also impossible to understand if exact book was ever digitized or not.