931–940 of 962 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My copying and pasting is twofold. First, in today's environment people will state AI hallucinations as fact or "google it yourself" as the reference. If someone doesn't know where to find that information they're left with the "someone on the net said XYZ". Secondly, I'm not always certain that if I do provide a link to a large document that people will find the relevant section in there. And second and a halfly, if…
So you're a lawyer and a librarian now? If a library really won't take the books for whatever reason you're imagining, I'm sure there are other organizations that would.
and that you're arguing that a library could accept a donation.
From Bartz v. Anthropic which was mostly about the pirated copies, but included some information about the destructive scanning, format shifting, and use as training as fair use.
> Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others).
> ...
> As a result, Anthropic’s format-change from print library copies to digital library copies was transformative under fair use factor one. Anthropic was entitled to retain a copy of these works in a print format. It retained them instead in a digital format, easing storage and searchability. And, the further copies made therefrom for purposes of training LLMs were themselves transformative for that further reason, as above.
Note especially the second sentence in the first paragraph. "The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company."
If the physical copy was shown, shared, or sold outside of the company the fair use defense would likely be much weaker than it currently is.
After the company has format shifted the original and retained the digital version, it cannot share or donate the original back to some other organization.
A library might take the books. It would be a legal liability for an AI company to give those books away and weaken the fair use claim that it stands on from Bartz v. Anthropic. The destruction of the original enhances the fair use claim.
From the ruling:
> For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.
> The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital.
There are no surplus copies when the original is destroyed.
One could argue it wasnt copied but transformed?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To play devils advocate, completely on the terms of your argument, would it be better for that particular human artifact to be shredded and its contents melted into an anonymized data pool, or for it to exist in a museum archive, in its original form, such that future generations can better understand what it was like to be alive in 1994? I’d personally choose the latter, especially given that the 1994 tv guide is no…
A reasonable opinion, but I'd personally strongly choose the former. A physical book in a museum archive is useless for 99% of the worlds population even if they really wanted that specific book and were able to find it, as they'd have to arrange for access, then travel (at incredible expense) to access it. Maybe they could ask the museum to digitize it, but that's still going to be days of delay and tens of dollars…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am going to have to see the numbers involved before I believe this. But even if it is true, it is still not a comparable behavior as I have argued above.
You didn't know it was happening at all just a few hours ago; you believed libraries had archivists on staff trained to preserve all the donations. You're in kind of an odd rhetorical position to be saying [citation needed].
I honestly don‘t understand what kind of a mission you are on here, and why you feel the need to defend AI companies by whatabouting libraries into this conversation. But whatever you are doing here, I think you have succeeded. This thread was supposed to be about the unambiguously bad behavior of AI companies, but now it is about libraries.
But OK. The numbers don’t add up. The 404 article talk about millions of copies, you mentioned hundreds of thousand. If we take these (extremely vague and unworkable) numbers at face value (which I am willing to do with the 404 article but not you because I trust journalists more than strangers on the internet), the scale of AI companies is one order of magnitude larger then libraries.
I still think this is a bad comparison regardless of the numbers. Seeking out books to destroy is worse behavior then not accepting donation. There is no equivalence in behavior here to compare.
I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…
Copyright holders are certainly responsible for keeping unavailable works inaccessible, but shredding is mostly an industrial scanning decision, not a copyright requirement
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
1. This is not the 404 media story you quoted as source
2. Maiberg's answer is most likely a book that has no emotional value. Translation: they do not know
Took them long enough to come up with any semblance of "initiative" like this. Hopefully it succeeds and shows how embarrassingly low is the number of actual rare books with no available copy of any sort anywhere, compared to the proportion of performative outrage about it
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...
But we don't necessarily know what we might find valuable in the future. 1. This is not the 404 media story you quoted as source 2. Maiberg's answer is most likely a book that has no emotional value. Translation: they do not know