Wasn't copyright law supposed to support creation and propagation of works of art ? Instead, apparently it is A-OK or even encouraged by the same law to destroy books.
That does not make any sense! Really might be high time to scrap it all.
Courts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.
It's a win-win-win for Amazon if they destroy the source in the process of scanning it. They get the AI training data, and it's cheaper for them to destroy the book in the process. Destroying the book ensures that it will be more difficult for competitors to scan the same content, thereby increasing the value of the data they've scanned.
Lastly, there's a misguided belief among some that it's somehow less of a copyright violation if the source is destroyed, but it's a violation either way unless the entity doing the scanning has permission from the copyright holder to make the copy.
Original full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book.
clearly fair use.
does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? theyre buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy. if you want the books preserved, maybe fund your libraries to get a copy or two?
It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that isn't the point. The post is trying to argue that the act is not sustainable and needlessly destructive, in pursuit of something that many people believe has limited value or unproven value, which is true.
Not the case here, but it's also important to keep in mind that laws too, can be unjust and immoral. Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.
Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business.
There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
Bullshit...they aren't sharing them with the internet archive, and at least the inventory of the defunct bookstore might have ended up with a collector or something. These slop factories have a less sound business model than any given bookstore, and you think they'll preserve those scans and share them with the world? Corporations regularly delete media for utterly capricious reasons.
> As mentioned elsewhere, this is also IP theft on a massive scale.
Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?
> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
It does though. A lot of people seem to think "it's a book!!!" means it takes on some mystical intrinsic value. That's bullshit. There's an absolute mountain of worthless and near-worthless books. I bet the vast vast majority of these books are those books - after all that's what Amazon wants. A ton of human written text as easily as possible. They obviously aren't buying first editions of Oliver Twist, or even second editions of Harry Potter.
> We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked
Yeah... because then it would reveal how unimportant they are. This sort of outrage inflation is counter-productive. People see through it, lose trust, and then when something bad actually happens they won't believe you.
Then why does Amazon want them? Why train an AI on worthless books?
Individually you might be right. Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
>Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
ask your aunt for the recipe, look it up online with a search engine, ask an LLM by describing how it tastes and the ingredients you remember, this is really not that complicated
>This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
could you be any more dramatic? you're acting like we are actually losing anything when in reality we're gaining from this, you'll just be able to ask the AI for the recipe instead of wasting hours and hours hunting down some old book and ordering it online for an exorbitant amount
What we have is not capitalism. There is way too much gate-keeping regulation for it to be called capitalism.
Just like China does not have communism.
If you look at China and think "That's not communism", just be aware that they also look at the west and think "That's not capitalism." Both are right. In fact both systems have converged.
China took the better aspects of communism and capitalism. We took some of the worst aspects of both... Except maybe free speech; but people are working hard on removing that one!
Most people agree it isn't normal. The problem is the people at the levers of power think otherwise. Capitalism as it exists in the US today, with effectively no regulation and deeply intertwined with governance, but in the wrong direction (corporations steering government) is basically the perfect exemplar of what they call a vicious circle in systems thinking. Couple that with the isolationist and individualist principles at the heart of American thinking and you have a perfect storm of runaway variable maximization (aka instability) as increasingly smaller groups of people amass increasing amounts of resources and power.
Wage labor is then the perfect structure to ensure that most resistance from the bottom is suppressed before it can even really start. When you depend on the corporation to succeed for your subsistence (since there is no adequate social safety net to fall back on) taking a principled stance and refusing to destroy great works of literature becomes a highly costly endeavor for most people.
The 404 Media report referenced in the article was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
“We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” (404media.co)
164 points | 3 days ago | 321 comments
Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
Wasn't copyright law supposed to support creation and propagation of works of art ? Instead, apparently it is A-OK or even encouraged by the same law to destroy books.
That does not make any sense! Really might be high time to scrap it all.
In times of substantial technological change, laws tend to lag substantially behind what is actually needed.
And in times of substantial inequality, they lag yet further.
Courts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.
It's a win-win-win for Amazon if they destroy the source in the process of scanning it. They get the AI training data, and it's cheaper for them to destroy the book in the process. Destroying the book ensures that it will be more difficult for competitors to scan the same content, thereby increasing the value of the data they've scanned.
Lastly, there's a misguided belief among some that it's somehow less of a copyright violation if the source is destroyed, but it's a violation either way unless the entity doing the scanning has permission from the copyright holder to make the copy.
Original full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
i dont get it.
this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book.
clearly fair use.
does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? theyre buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy. if you want the books preserved, maybe fund your libraries to get a copy or two?
It's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that isn't the point. The post is trying to argue that the act is not sustainable and needlessly destructive, in pursuit of something that many people believe has limited value or unproven value, which is true.
Not the case here, but it's also important to keep in mind that laws too, can be unjust and immoral. Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.
This has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books.
For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such.
But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.
It is pure evel and anyone involved in this is a criminal that should be harshly punished. Books are sacred.
Is it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business.
There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
Bullshit...they aren't sharing them with the internet archive, and at least the inventory of the defunct bookstore might have ended up with a collector or something. These slop factories have a less sound business model than any given bookstore, and you think they'll preserve those scans and share them with the world? Corporations regularly delete media for utterly capricious reasons.
Indeed. In fact I suspect that the destruction is the point. A book that Anthropic destroys the last copy of is a book that OpenAI will never have.
If they were sharing the scans it would be great but they’re not.
Discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
> As mentioned elsewhere, this is also IP theft on a massive scale.
Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
I imagine the argument could go like this.
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?
> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable.
It does though. A lot of people seem to think "it's a book!!!" means it takes on some mystical intrinsic value. That's bullshit. There's an absolute mountain of worthless and near-worthless books. I bet the vast vast majority of these books are those books - after all that's what Amazon wants. A ton of human written text as easily as possible. They obviously aren't buying first editions of Oliver Twist, or even second editions of Harry Potter.
> We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked
Yeah... because then it would reveal how unimportant they are. This sort of outrage inflation is counter-productive. People see through it, lose trust, and then when something bad actually happens they won't believe you.
Then why does Amazon want them? Why train an AI on worthless books?
Individually you might be right. Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
>Then why does Amazon want them?
quantity has a quality of its own
>Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such.
ask your aunt for the recipe, look it up online with a search engine, ask an LLM by describing how it tastes and the ingredients you remember, this is really not that complicated
>This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
could you be any more dramatic? you're acting like we are actually losing anything when in reality we're gaining from this, you'll just be able to ask the AI for the recipe instead of wasting hours and hours hunting down some old book and ordering it online for an exorbitant amount
Getting real sick of capitalism systematically consuming and destroying everything it touches.
These behaviours would be described as obsessive and pathological in any clinical setting, but when they're done for profit it's somehow normal.
What we have is not capitalism. There is way too much gate-keeping regulation for it to be called capitalism.
Just like China does not have communism.
If you look at China and think "That's not communism", just be aware that they also look at the west and think "That's not capitalism." Both are right. In fact both systems have converged.
China took the better aspects of communism and capitalism. We took some of the worst aspects of both... Except maybe free speech; but people are working hard on removing that one!
Most people agree it isn't normal. The problem is the people at the levers of power think otherwise. Capitalism as it exists in the US today, with effectively no regulation and deeply intertwined with governance, but in the wrong direction (corporations steering government) is basically the perfect exemplar of what they call a vicious circle in systems thinking. Couple that with the isolationist and individualist principles at the heart of American thinking and you have a perfect storm of runaway variable maximization (aka instability) as increasingly smaller groups of people amass increasing amounts of resources and power.
Wage labor is then the perfect structure to ensure that most resistance from the bottom is suppressed before it can even really start. When you depend on the corporation to succeed for your subsistence (since there is no adequate social safety net to fall back on) taking a principled stance and refusing to destroy great works of literature becomes a highly costly endeavor for most people.