alt Hacker News> You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright?
IDK about the shredding, it's not nice, but it's more a problem with copyright law than AI companies.
Scanning books you own should be legal from a copyright point of view, and not require shredding.
Second, one should think about abandoned property provisions for copyright works published more than 50 years ago and in danger of being forgotten: once challenged, either you as the owner have to prove that the work is preserved for future generations (e.g. in various libraries around the world), or you have to authorize further copies, or you give up copyright on the work.
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> You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal.
An 18th century book would be out of copyright so why would it be illegal to keep the original and scan it?
> Aren't they shredding only the books still under copyright protection? How is an 18th century botanical text still under copyright?
It's cheaper to scan the books if you do it destructively. Cost. That's why they're shredding irreplaceable texts. Nothing to do with copyright.
https://www.404media.co/ai-companies-are-buying-tons-of-old-...
Old rare books where there are single digit copies should enjoy some sort of patrimonial protection just like museum pieces. You can own them but have the state have the option to buy it if you’re about to significantly deface it or destroy it.
Scanning books by taking them apart into singular pages and scanning those pages is faster and cheaper. AI training is a numbers game, so they want faster and cheaper.
What happens to the pages after? No one needs them anymore, so they get mulched and recycled.
That would be the dominant scanning method even if copyright wasn't a thing. But then again - if copyright wasn't a thing, there would be much less need to scan any physical media.
The reason why OpenAI can't just go on Amazon, buy a "digital edition" of a 2018 book and use that is that it would violate the license in ten ways, and then the DMCA laws that forbid breaking DRM on top of it.