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World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanent (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 1 day ago by obbeel@kbin.earth to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna's Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.

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[-] FjordDan@lemmy.zip 3 points 1 day ago

In some interpretation of copyright law, it's considered a "transfer" rather than a "copy" if you destroy the physical original. (Ignore all subsequent copying of the digital version.)

Actually old and rare books are probably public domain, so that's not an argument.

Also, most of the books they scan/destroy are low quality trashy novels that won't even sell at thrift stores. But as they are written by humans it is still useful for training models.

[-] Aceticon@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Copyright nowadays is up from the original "25 years" to around "Death of author + 50 years" (a bit more in the US) which is almost always more than 100 years in total, so those "old" books are nowaday almost a century old or more.

(Well, sorta, if their copyright expired BEFORE new legislation was introduced to extend copyright length as has been regularly done for almost a century, those works didn't got back under copyright after the extension, and as at least in the US copyright extension legislation was seeming driven by wanting to keep the first Mickey Mouse cartoon under copyright, at least in the US said "old" out of copyright books will mainly be from before 1928).

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026

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