531–540 of 961 posts
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Like all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space. It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.
They are also an AI company now. Why would they stop?
I don't see any mention of Project Ocean - AKA Google books. Before AI they endevoured to digitize books in a massive online library. This inccluded rare and out of print books many which are archived at libraries. Because they had to preserve the books and return them in the condition they received then they created elaborate technology to accomplish this. The project was met with significant legal challenges from a…
Like all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space. It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like all things, Google will eventually realize they cannot make significant ad revenue and they will eventually give up and discontinue serving this, though I doubt it's more than a scratch in terms of disk space. It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.
They are also an AI company now. Why would they stop?
Book scans, secreted away, are worthless to the public.
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It was never that dramatic, and it’s declining day by day. It’s a panic over a real but small problem. Order of magnitude more water is lost from wasted irrigation (e.g. during rain, of fallow fields, sprayed into windy air, etc) than data centers.
Problem with data centers is that companies want to build them near densely populated areas that already have problems with water supply and high utility bills.
2. Datacenters have been shown to reduce utility prices. They provide suppliers with previsible long term demand which allows for cost-effective network and production planning.
I was surprised to read that Anthropic (and probably other data / model companies) are doing this and it's extremely disappointing, as working towards the benefit of humanity is not an exclusive right / domain of theirs but rather, is a shared responsibility and mission carried by all of humanity itself as a collective responsibility. Thus, the preservation of this knowledge, its availability, and accessibility are t…
How can anyone say this with a straight face. The knowledge is not destroyed, it is transformed. You can make use of it today in the form of LLMs and the scans still exist. Nothing was lost. It's literally no different from them buying books and stocking them in a private library not open to the public. It's not called the Scanning of Alexandria because if it was, it wouldn't have made a blip in the history, Alexandria's libraries were burned, those books, that knowledge was destroyed. Then only thing being destroyed here is physical copy (again for the people in the back: a copy).
> Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available.
Those same copyright restrictions are exactly what would prevent them from sharing the archives. Your beef is with copyright, not the AI companies who are (in this one, rare, instance) following copyright laws/rules.
The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? Trying to keep an edge with their training sets? Isn't it ridiculous, considering the sheer size of them and statistical insignificance of the set differences?
> The main question is why aren't they leaking it to AA themselves? How is this a question at all? They’re scanning books because the courts determined that it’s the only way to use that data. They are forbidden from using digital copies found on places like Anna’s Archive. They must acquire and scan the book. They cannot redistribute the book. The Internet Archive tried that and the courts shut it down. You cannot s…
Hence the “leaking” part.
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You can't compare an island or food to books though, because the former are only really valuable in their atomic form. Like if you take detailed pictures, people can't live on or eat those pictures. You scan books though and all the value they provide is still fully available in bit form, because books merely contain information. And of course being in bit form means they can be trivially copied, technically. But the…
It's culture. These scans are of course not distributed, so the value doesn't quite continue to exist. You say "culture", but is is culture , and culture that was interesting enough to write down. Writing a book in the 70s isn't a trivial thing, there are gatekeepers, editors, publishers etc., even for your little book about local history, and the information is valuable to the community it's about. It affects their…
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>From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge. How tho? Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take t…
Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today) Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books ins…
"Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on.
Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...."
https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...
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So if I scan a book, sell it, and keep using the scan, is that legal? (Spoiler: That's not legal. It's a violation of IP law.)
Selling it is not allowed. The inability to sell it does not require its destruction.
I'm old enough to have been around when DCMA legislation was under discussion. Many people were dead-set against it and raised concerns over matters exactly like this. In Rainbows End (2006), Vernor Vinge wrote about a similar scenario where a robot went through the university library shredding books, and scanned the shredded pieces to recombined them into a digital archive.
Anthropic may be doing shady things and may have even done this on their own recognizance, we just don't know. As it stand, this is 100% a consequence of US copyright law, much of which was written by large corporations to protect their own assets.