301–310 of 559 posts
Digitizing books, even if it means the destruction of the original, means more people end up having access to the knowledge within, and is a good thing. Full stop.
> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright? IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright…
Books that are shredded can’t be scanned by competitors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, courts so far in the jurisdictions which have heard such cases, have ruled it's fair use. There is plenty of ongoing litigation in many jurisdictions, so it's way too early to just decree "it's been determined". It likely won't be for years to come.
Why did Anthropic settle with authors for 1.5 billion then? Surely their lawyers must have decided there's a pretty good chance of judges ultimately deciding that it is copyright infringement?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A friend proposed that copyright should just die with the author and / or their spouse and I'm left agreeing. I want books and music to be less strict on copyright. Some of my favorite YouTube channels break down music and songs, and go as far as recreating beats / tracks from famous hip hop songs, but someone at a record label company dings every one of their videos, they can barely sample a few seconds, its VERY CL…
This would create incentive to kill people
sure, you don't have to pay royalties, but any other publisher can now publish too
Horrendous stewardship of humanities collective knowledge all for profit and the race to have the one god computer to rule them all.
As more time passes it becomes clearer that America’s AI strategy should’ve been a public private partnership where the public owned the datasets and the underlying models and we’d leave the productionizing of LLMs to private businesses
I've limited sympathy for the publishers. 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 stil…
This doesn't affect publishers.
It affects humanity as a whole by having large private parties hoard books to partly destroy them. The covers and spines can have historical value too. There's not even a reason for these companies to release their scans to the public once the copyright expires.
It prevents proper preservation by archivists and preservationists.
From what I understand, the rare books in question are not some historically relevant medieval manuscripts, but rather some relatively recent books (still under copyright) for which there are few print copies available for purchase. I am not sure that physically destructing one copy of this type of book to preserve its contents digitally is so bad. Pretty much anything that is still under copyright should be valuable…
These are increasingly available online, btw. Historical research is accelerated when historians have direct access to scans of relevant source material. Not destructively scanned, of course.
How much of this shredding them isn’t just copyright but rather they don’t want anyone else having this information in their datasets? Horrendous stewardship of humanities collective knowledge all for profit and the race to have the one god computer to rule them all. As more time passes it becomes clearer that America’s AI strategy should’ve been a public private partnership where the public owned the datasets and th…
Also, they can then just recycle/dispose of the paper and don't have to worry about reselling/donating the books themselves. I suspect this is all about speed of data ingestion and anything else is a side effect they don't care about.
I've limited sympathy for the publishers. 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 stil…