alt Hacker NewsMaybe we can kill two birds with one stone: digitize rare books and reverse the damage from Authors Guild v. Google [1].
Let AI companies do this. But require them to make the digital copies public. Maybe with a multi-year delay, to give the original scanner advantage to doing it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
Yeah, I was thinking along these lines...
Let's say one of the books to be digitized and destroyed is the sole remaining copy of a book from 1850, which is now considered public domain.
On one hand, hoarding such a book, stealing its content from the public domain, locking its content behind a for-profit machine, and destroying the only remaining copy is clearly wrong. It's equivalent to stealing a public resource, just like mining minerals or oil on public lands without a permit or mineral rights. Pure extraction.
On the other hand, taking care to digitize the copy and making it available for free in perpetuity, as well as being required through regulation to provide access to that content through, let's say a public utility LLM/AI available for free through libraries and online... and perhaps after fair due diligence being required to preserve physical copies in a public archive of rare books of which there are no known remaining physical copies...
That seems much more reasonable to me at least. I can imagine there are many who would not see it that way though. Do we see it happening or gaining regulatory, moral and/or public support?