I wish I had fewer opportunities to post this gif, I hate it
Amazon, destroying books, this is such a full circle moment for them
Friends don’t let friends use any form of Amazon they can choose to.
Can they at least provide all the scans to the public for free? It's not like anyone is going to care if they violate copyright, that only applies to regular people.
That's why they are scanning them and destroying them. Someone realized they can capitalize knowledge. We're going to get the privilege of letting billionaires gate keep information and knowledge
Unfortunately, that would violate copyright law. In fact, the whole point of the destruction is to circumvent copyright, as apparently there was a ruling that scanning, tokenizing, and then destroying the original is transformative enough to be considered, "fair use."
You are definitely right. It just sucks that destroying books is "fair use" while using movie clips to make a parody video gets taken down with little recourse.
fucking book burners
Amazon wasn't caught doing shit. "Caught" implies there is a possibility of consequences. Two days from now nobody is going to remember this story and the world will move on and there will be no consequences for this.
"caught" also implies they've been hiding it... It's been out in the open how they scan books to train AI for a while now.
I don't think most people realize that the most efficient process for scanning books involves disassembling them.
So of course they're upset to hear the books are disposed of afterwards.
It has been almost a trope that every time the discussion of them buying up the used market and cutting them up to scan, some apologist comes along and says that these books are mass produced garbage and not rare.
Especially since the articles make it clear that the AI companies don't care about rarity or quality. It's just a dragnet to get as many books as possible. Sure, a lot of the books are going to be garbage, but some of them are going to be valuable, too.
The AI must be fed, and the only criterion is the book has to be published before 2022.
Whistle-blown?
I wish there were any path for accountability anymore.
Name one "rare" book. Same articles never an evidence of what's rare.
Exactly what is valuable?
Edit: love the downvotes, yet zero proof there is a rare book involved. We have had people look this up and post to Lemmy, no rare books found.
But hey facts dont matter right?
It a book one with an internal temperature less than 125⁰ F.
🤔 this actually seems like a good point. Like, I've seen videos of spines getting sliced off of old-looking books, and presented in the context of them being rare, but never actually fact-checked it myself. Now I'm wondering if I've been fooled. (I really hope so, in this case.)
I keep thinking there might be ones that are considered somewhat rare, but that is so relative. Its not like the real rare boom market isn't there. I was looking at a couple books to buy that are considered rare, although they are public domain. They aren't cheap maybe 2 to 3 hundred each, but I do have a choice of nearly 5 different printings to choose from, meaning if I buy one they dont go away entirely.
Also, who are the booksellers? Does this mean they can start pushing prices up for these purchases? Surely if AI companies are buying all the rare books they would begin to price them accordingly.
Also, for the rare books, are people trying to buy them to preserve them?
More alarming was the upshot of that lawsuit: a judge ruled that because Anthropic was turning the physical texts into digital ones and destroying the original copies, it was “transformative” and therefore didn’t violate copyright law.
So by that token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid. Otherwise, having it ingested by an AI has no purpose it it's not meant to be referenced in response to requests by the end user.
No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.
SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people's printed works.
Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it's passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.
But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn't apply to anything else. So you can't use "physical medium" because books are a special case and have their own special US law.
For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.
Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.
Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.
And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it's just under a different framework known as the DMCA.
That's not transformative.
That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole "fair use" thing.
This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I'm not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren't true.
And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren't LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it's impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.
Oh! Can I play? Let me transcode a video into a new format and put it on a blu-ray and then delete the old file! Transformative, lol.
https://lemmy.world/search?q=rare+books&type=Posts&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=true
This has been posted to death. Does this really need ot be a weekly thread? There is nothing to discuss its bad and we hate AI and we hate amazon.
I've been on Lemmy since 2023 and I've never seen this article. Not everybody is chronically online. Please don't listen to this guy.
Repost spam kills forum discussion. If you missed this post you can see it in the 10 other places it was posted yesterday.
That's what Lemmy is. Regurgitating the same story over and over again. For months.
DAE communist manifesto, AI Bad, tanks good?
They scan them and destroy them so other AI companies can never get them.
Other AI companies can still buy them, they're just rare because nobody bought them in the first place. They destroy them because scanning them is faster and in some jurisdictions that absolves you from copyright infringement since the amount of copies doesn't go up
I'm just repeating what 404 media said on their July 21 podcast. They said that the first reports of AI book buyups were in Spain and the Netherlands, from rare book traders. The theory is that these AI companies are in a race to get the rare books first because they will be scanned and destroyed and they know that the widely circulated books will be available later
Edit: and if you scan and destroy rare books then you have an advantage over the competition, another company can't scan a book you've destroyed
I stopped using Amazon like 8 years ago over various previous inhumane issues
Seems the rest of the world prefers slightly more convenience
What are you gonna do I guess
Amazon never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity
Nothing good ever came of destroying books.
The most ironic thing is that this is the only way that the current cultural metastasis appreciates rare knowledge. Which we once did!
Like music it is the most fundamentally human endeavor and it has been destructively gamified. Thank fucking god for libraries, support yours!!!!!
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
