And from all i have read about the settlement the sum was 1.5 billion or -3000 per book.
For 500,000 deliberate copyright infringements by a multi-billion-dollar corporation with the intention to generate revenue from the data this is hardly something i would call 'sued to pieces'
Calling permanent destruction of rare books, and actively reducing the pool of human knowledge, a "non-problem" is about as rational as those people who burnt rare artworks after "converting" them to NFTs.
The rarity of a book doesn't actually tell you much about the value of the information within. Many rare books are practically worthless, and get destroyed all the time by institutions like libraries.
Nothing reveals the value of information. New purposes for old information arise unexpectedly. For each purpose, or person, other people's assessment of value is wrong. Books destroyed by libraries are often books I wanted. Space constraints are tragic.
So, does this make the destruction of books to feed AI a non-problem? Is the loss of printed information to landfill completely fine and not regrettable? The loss of books to AI is on top of the loss to landfill, and seeks out books somewhat methodically, which means a bias toward rare books, compared to obtaining books by weight.
The argument goes like this, I suppose: some percentage of the 640 thousand tons of landfill books (or whatever this year's figure is) were rare, but unwanted. Therefore, because some rare books are unwanted, and some unwanted books are not valuable, the rare books that were methodically bought to feed AI were kind of sort of going to go to landfill anyway, and nothing of value was lost.
When I used to work for a bookseller, it seemed our collection existed in order to hoard books. I remember items such as Worms (C. Darwin) and old cricket almanacs (inexplicably popular). Much of my time was spent hauling very heavy boxes of books around on a sack barrow. We had a constant objective of getting rid of books. Sometimes thieves would help us out by removing the ones with higher prices, but that hardly made any difference, and the number of books only increased until the owner's death. I don't know what happened after that, but I imagine they were mostly thrown away. That's how it goes. But this loss is a sad thing. I made some money in wages, but I the owner told me he generally lost money most of time, supporting the project with his other job. It was because he liked books.
what can anyone do individually to do anything about it? until regulation happens at a governmental level, there's not a whole ton the average joe schmoe can do about it.
Does it matter much? Books are digital anyway and every book has a copy of itself somewhere in the world.
It's not like something irreplaceable is being destroyed.
These projects are trying to crawl the whole ISBN space. I know for a fact from my own academic discipline that there are ISBN-issued books containing some useful scholarship that were printed in a print run of as little as 50 or 100 copies, and for various reasons most of those copies are basically lost now to digital-archiving efforts. If someone is destroying a remaining copy before shadow-library scanners can get to it, that is indeed lamentable.
The solution would seem to be not to blame the AI companies for using their property as they wish, but to loosen copyright law so they could release their scanned versions to the public and/or resell their books after scanning them. Or force publishers to print on demand any work they wish to keep the copyrights for.
Why do you think they want to release the scanned version? Having a model trained on exclusive content not available to competitors is a competitive advantage.
Selling the books afterwards would be additional work and not guaranteed to bring any profit or even any significant reimbursement. A company is likely to find simply pulping the books to be the most cost-effective solutions.
I think you are overestimating the amount of people outraged by this, and so overestimating a business's need to placate them. Among popular discontent against AI companies, this is very far down the list.
This has been covered well enough in the press (this HN link is to Forbes, a mass-market content mill). It is no secret. Me, I concluded that one reason for the lack of outrage is probably that the general public is less and less interested in books as a format.
Thank you. Everyone acts like every book gets 20k copies and is endlessly available. Feels like a time to modernize the federal government library and FEDLINK to recieve scans of every destroyed book to ensure these rare copies are not lost in this manner.
if you have familiarity with books, you will know that they are also unofficial repositories. a book may be published, but after purchase it may be annotated, dog eared, and exposed to a work environment, basically imbued with information beyond its original manifest.
All books are sacred. Anyone who destroys books is a criminal and should be punished hard, ideally to make an example, preventing more books from being destroyed.
You should talk to your local librarians about how they handle deaccessioning books. You may be surprised with how many they destroy as part of standard operations.
This kind of clickbait headline driven, misinformed takes really need to stop, we didn’t get a single rare book title from these “reporters”, I wonder why?
I doubt any rare valuable book is being destroyed. If a book were valuable, it would make sense to scan it non-destructively. This is especially the case for old rare books that are long out of copyright; the copyright motivation for not keeping the original copy around does not exist.
The books being destroyed as so worthless they're bought in bulk and were destined for junking anyway, like the 600 million books that are destroyed each year just in the US. At least as pulp they can contribute something of slight value.
Here's a way these old supposed valuable books can get a new life. Go wild! Prices start at $12.99 per linear foot. This clearly demonstrates the value society assigns to these precious rectangular prisms of inked cellulose.
I have a sneaking suspicion the whole tempest-in-a-teapot was astroturfed by publishers who were miffed at the courts looking favorably on scanning for AI training.
Since my comment elsewhere in the thread. These projects are largely trying to crawl the entire ISBN space, and this includes rare but worth-saving books printed in small runs (scholarly works, books on local history, etc.); that they can be bought for cheap says little about the exclusiveness of the info within them, as the booksellers pricing them probably have little or no knowledge of the respective field.
As for "old rare books out of copyright", those generally predate ISBNs and so are not being so mercilessly crawled by semi-automated means.
> that they can be bought for cheap says little about the exclusiveness of the info within them, as the booksellers pricing thdm probably have little or no knowledge of the respective field.
No professional bookseller today is pricing a book that they aren't familiar with without putting the ISBN into a bookseller search and finding out the market price. The hunting booksellers have dedicated PDAs that will scan the UPC on the back, and speak the current price into earbuds for quick searching at charity book sales.
I don't think you are aware of just how many kinds of books are assigned an ISBN number, and so will get hit by a project crawling the whole numerical space.
Within my own (non-destructive!) scanning contributions for the shadow libraries, I have gone through innumerable ISBN-issued books from Eastern Europe and the former USSR printed in very small runs, often 50-100 copies. When one of those few copies finds its way to a used-bookseller, it is usually priced very low: it doesn't look attractive to a general audience, there is no agreed "market price from a bookseller search" because maybe no other seller has ever seen it, and the bookseller doesn't know that it holds exclusive information that some scholars would prefer be saved.
So if one cannot easily determine if these books are valuable, how do you propose they would be saved from the vast stream of books constantly being destroyed? Isn't their value conditional on this identification already having been performed?
This is interesting. Similar to the problem of having a Van Gogh in 1890 when it's worth nothing in price. You can reasonably say:
It's taking up space. It's not fashionable, and it looks kind of ugly to me. Who's Doctor Gachet anyway? I can't predict that anybody will ever want this. So, I'll throw it away.
But you can also reasonably say:
It's not taking up much space. Fashions change along with culture and ideas. I like paintings. People like paintings generally. I can't predict that nobody will ever want this. So, I'll keep it.
I conclude that if you're willing to be an archivist, you're doing good, and somebody somewhere should be willing to be an archivist. Ideally several people. This doesn't depend on the price of items at time of archiving.
If I were a not so good guy running an AI company and I got my hands on a valuable book, I would scan the book and destroy the paper copy. This way, others won't scan that knowledge for themselves and would have to come to my company to get access to the knowledge and only crumbs of that knowledge at my discretion.
This whole thread has brought the worst out in hn. Or maybe this is the mask off hn? Books are not a fungible commodity. Books are sacred, for them to be digested and shit out by a slop machine en masse as a powergrab against the future is grotesque.
Books are not sacred. This is an obviously wrong fossil of a past age when books were expensive and difficult to reproduce. Today? Books are cheap disposable information delivery vehicles. It makes no more sense to lament their destruction than it does to lament the deletion of a file on your hard drive.
If you can defend people who use armed drones to shoot down young children fleeing the remains of their bombed school, what are a few less IDF terrorists?
Then in the interest of things being balanced, I want to also hear what we are ignoring about the islamist republic of Iran slaughtering 30 000 of its own people, because they were protesting, unarmed, in the streets of Teheran.
Certainly you have something to say about that too?
And what about 1200 civilians getting slaughtered at a music festival on october 7th: what's your take on that?
P.S: as a sidenote, what does your comment have to do with AI destroying books?
The better practice would have been to download an existing archive. They did. They got sued to pieces over it. So this is the only legal avenue.
They could have paid the authors?
And from all i have read about the settlement the sum was 1.5 billion or -3000 per book. For 500,000 deliberate copyright infringements by a multi-billion-dollar corporation with the intention to generate revenue from the data this is hardly something i would call 'sued to pieces'
Even if they "paid the authors" they would still be destroying the books for the purposes of staying compliant with copyright laws.
Yes, we are, because it's a non-problem.
Calling permanent destruction of rare books, and actively reducing the pool of human knowledge, a "non-problem" is about as rational as those people who burnt rare artworks after "converting" them to NFTs.
The rarity of a book doesn't actually tell you much about the value of the information within. Many rare books are practically worthless, and get destroyed all the time by institutions like libraries.
Nothing reveals the value of information. New purposes for old information arise unexpectedly. For each purpose, or person, other people's assessment of value is wrong. Books destroyed by libraries are often books I wanted. Space constraints are tragic.
This is a totally imaginary issue. Countless "rare books" are thrown away every day.
1. Why is "rare books" in quotes,
2. How do you know,
3. How many is countless,
4. So what?
> Why is "rare books" in quotes,
Because the implications that the rarity of said books makes them valuable is entirely unsupported.
> 2. How do you know,
Nearly 2 million books are destroyed each day in the US. Are you asserting not one of them is rare?
So, some books that are rare are not valuable, but we can't know which ones, and it's not an imaginary issue.
How do you know "two million", by the way?
Sorry, I misremembered, it was 320 million books/year, so nearly 1 million/day, not 2 million.
Where did you find this out?
https://www.nwf.org/~/media/PDFs/Eco-schools/McGraw%20Hill/T...
OK. That cites this 2009 report: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/P100A0NX.txt?ZyActionD=Z... where page 47 has a table, with 640 thousand tons of books added to landfill in 2009, along with a slightly greater weight of magazines.
So, does this make the destruction of books to feed AI a non-problem? Is the loss of printed information to landfill completely fine and not regrettable? The loss of books to AI is on top of the loss to landfill, and seeks out books somewhat methodically, which means a bias toward rare books, compared to obtaining books by weight.
The argument goes like this, I suppose: some percentage of the 640 thousand tons of landfill books (or whatever this year's figure is) were rare, but unwanted. Therefore, because some rare books are unwanted, and some unwanted books are not valuable, the rare books that were methodically bought to feed AI were kind of sort of going to go to landfill anyway, and nothing of value was lost.
A better question is if you are a bookstore owner why would you sell books to these companies?
I wouldnt.
For the same reason a bookstore would sell books to anyone: to make money.
Why do you think bookstores exist?
When I used to work for a bookseller, it seemed our collection existed in order to hoard books. I remember items such as Worms (C. Darwin) and old cricket almanacs (inexplicably popular). Much of my time was spent hauling very heavy boxes of books around on a sack barrow. We had a constant objective of getting rid of books. Sometimes thieves would help us out by removing the ones with higher prices, but that hardly made any difference, and the number of books only increased until the owner's death. I don't know what happened after that, but I imagine they were mostly thrown away. That's how it goes. But this loss is a sad thing. I made some money in wages, but I the owner told me he generally lost money most of time, supporting the project with his other job. It was because he liked books.
Story from August OP;
Various discussions:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49383026
what can anyone do individually to do anything about it? until regulation happens at a governmental level, there's not a whole ton the average joe schmoe can do about it.
Technically it's regulation that forces that.
Anyone remembers when Google Books project might have provided a digital library after painstakingly non-destructively scanning books?
Does it matter much? Books are digital anyway and every book has a copy of itself somewhere in the world. It's not like something irreplaceable is being destroyed.
These projects are trying to crawl the whole ISBN space. I know for a fact from my own academic discipline that there are ISBN-issued books containing some useful scholarship that were printed in a print run of as little as 50 or 100 copies, and for various reasons most of those copies are basically lost now to digital-archiving efforts. If someone is destroying a remaining copy before shadow-library scanners can get to it, that is indeed lamentable.
The solution would seem to be not to blame the AI companies for using their property as they wish, but to loosen copyright law so they could release their scanned versions to the public and/or resell their books after scanning them. Or force publishers to print on demand any work they wish to keep the copyrights for.
Why do you think they want to release the scanned version? Having a model trained on exclusive content not available to competitors is a competitive advantage.
Selling the books afterwards would be additional work and not guaranteed to bring any profit or even any significant reimbursement. A company is likely to find simply pulping the books to be the most cost-effective solutions.
Goodwill. It would instantly end this line of attack against them, for little cost. The only reason they don't do it now is that it's illegal.
I think you are overestimating the amount of people outraged by this, and so overestimating a business's need to placate them. Among popular discontent against AI companies, this is very far down the list.
That is because no one knows. You can't see it, if they saw it, they would be furious.
This has been covered well enough in the press (this HN link is to Forbes, a mass-market content mill). It is no secret. Me, I concluded that one reason for the lack of outrage is probably that the general public is less and less interested in books as a format.
Thank you. Everyone acts like every book gets 20k copies and is endlessly available. Feels like a time to modernize the federal government library and FEDLINK to recieve scans of every destroyed book to ensure these rare copies are not lost in this manner.
if you have familiarity with books, you will know that they are also unofficial repositories. a book may be published, but after purchase it may be annotated, dog eared, and exposed to a work environment, basically imbued with information beyond its original manifest.
Look at the account.. it's the product of book destruction. Books are not "digital anyway".. unless it's the only way you process them.
Yes. Stop beating a dead horse.
All books are sacred. Anyone who destroys books is a criminal and should be punished hard, ideally to make an example, preventing more books from being destroyed.
You should talk to your local librarians about how they handle deaccessioning books. You may be surprised with how many they destroy as part of standard operations.
This is obviously wrong, and not by a small margin. It's grossly ridiculous if you think about it. It's also clearly unconstitutional in the US.
This kind of clickbait headline driven, misinformed takes really need to stop, we didn’t get a single rare book title from these “reporters”, I wonder why?
AI is destroying my fetish objects! We must act and buy all the books to protect them!
Is it true that examples of the books in question would be some operators manual for a 1970s toaster?
Claude shipped a lot of books from Taiwan to the United States.
I know this is old but it seems that we've somehow moved on from the fact that we're in a modern Alexandria moment where rare text is being destroyed
I doubt any rare valuable book is being destroyed. If a book were valuable, it would make sense to scan it non-destructively. This is especially the case for old rare books that are long out of copyright; the copyright motivation for not keeping the original copy around does not exist.
The books being destroyed as so worthless they're bought in bulk and were destined for junking anyway, like the 600 million books that are destroyed each year just in the US. At least as pulp they can contribute something of slight value.
Here's a way these old supposed valuable books can get a new life. Go wild! Prices start at $12.99 per linear foot. This clearly demonstrates the value society assigns to these precious rectangular prisms of inked cellulose.
https://booksbythefoot.com/
I have a sneaking suspicion the whole tempest-in-a-teapot was astroturfed by publishers who were miffed at the courts looking favorably on scanning for AI training.
Since my comment elsewhere in the thread. These projects are largely trying to crawl the entire ISBN space, and this includes rare but worth-saving books printed in small runs (scholarly works, books on local history, etc.); that they can be bought for cheap says little about the exclusiveness of the info within them, as the booksellers pricing them probably have little or no knowledge of the respective field.
As for "old rare books out of copyright", those generally predate ISBNs and so are not being so mercilessly crawled by semi-automated means.
> that they can be bought for cheap says little about the exclusiveness of the info within them, as the booksellers pricing thdm probably have little or no knowledge of the respective field.
No professional bookseller today is pricing a book that they aren't familiar with without putting the ISBN into a bookseller search and finding out the market price. The hunting booksellers have dedicated PDAs that will scan the UPC on the back, and speak the current price into earbuds for quick searching at charity book sales.
I don't think you are aware of just how many kinds of books are assigned an ISBN number, and so will get hit by a project crawling the whole numerical space.
Within my own (non-destructive!) scanning contributions for the shadow libraries, I have gone through innumerable ISBN-issued books from Eastern Europe and the former USSR printed in very small runs, often 50-100 copies. When one of those few copies finds its way to a used-bookseller, it is usually priced very low: it doesn't look attractive to a general audience, there is no agreed "market price from a bookseller search" because maybe no other seller has ever seen it, and the bookseller doesn't know that it holds exclusive information that some scholars would prefer be saved.
So if one cannot easily determine if these books are valuable, how do you propose they would be saved from the vast stream of books constantly being destroyed? Isn't their value conditional on this identification already having been performed?
This is interesting. Similar to the problem of having a Van Gogh in 1890 when it's worth nothing in price. You can reasonably say:
It's taking up space. It's not fashionable, and it looks kind of ugly to me. Who's Doctor Gachet anyway? I can't predict that anybody will ever want this. So, I'll throw it away.
But you can also reasonably say:
It's not taking up much space. Fashions change along with culture and ideas. I like paintings. People like paintings generally. I can't predict that nobody will ever want this. So, I'll keep it.
I conclude that if you're willing to be an archivist, you're doing good, and somebody somewhere should be willing to be an archivist. Ideally several people. This doesn't depend on the price of items at time of archiving.
I've seen these guys in operation!
The construction of roads can use about 45,000 books per mile.
If I were a not so good guy running an AI company and I got my hands on a valuable book, I would scan the book and destroy the paper copy. This way, others won't scan that knowledge for themselves and would have to come to my company to get access to the knowledge and only crumbs of that knowledge at my discretion.
Yes there are people who have this psychology.
This whole thread has brought the worst out in hn. Or maybe this is the mask off hn? Books are not a fungible commodity. Books are sacred, for them to be digested and shit out by a slop machine en masse as a powergrab against the future is grotesque.
Books are not sacred. This is an obviously wrong fossil of a past age when books were expensive and difficult to reproduce. Today? Books are cheap disposable information delivery vehicles. It makes no more sense to lament their destruction than it does to lament the deletion of a file on your hard drive.
You have no god damn clue what you are talking about. You are a one man brigade about the destruction of books.
These older books that don't have ISBNs don't exist anywhere else. They aren't digitized.
My god. I wasn't saying they were digitized. I was making an analogy. Analogy != identity!
Those are the kind of books being destroyed, are they? Paper copies of digital files that remain preserved, is that right?
I think you need to look up the word "analogy" in the dictionary.
No, I was not asserting that, obviously.
Unfortunately the dictionary got destroyed.
[flagged]
If you can defend people who kidnap children and rape festival-goers, what are a few less Hamas terrorists ?
If you can defend people who use armed drones to shoot down young children fleeing the remains of their bombed school, what are a few less IDF terrorists?
Then in the interest of things being balanced, I want to also hear what we are ignoring about the islamist republic of Iran slaughtering 30 000 of its own people, because they were protesting, unarmed, in the streets of Teheran.
Certainly you have something to say about that too?
And what about 1200 civilians getting slaughtered at a music festival on october 7th: what's your take on that?
P.S: as a sidenote, what does your comment have to do with AI destroying books?
[flagged]
A model being local doesn't mean it wasn't trained on books that were subsequently destroyed, does it?