alt Hacker NewsI dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them.
Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.
edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than one copy.
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It is also the case that the copyright holders are often putting restrictions around use of electronic forms that are driving the desire to use physical copies. I doubt AI companies would use a single physical book if they could avoid it - absent the legal cloud over electronic rights.
I have no evidence but I can't help suspecting in part the publicity around this is driven in part by rights holders that want to force AI companies back to e-books where they can force them into licensing deals.
Yes. I dont understand at all what AA is worried about. One copy of a book is no big deal? good will and used book stores throw out a lot more than that.
> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.
Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.
Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?
Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way?
Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.
They don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.
If only this complaint was being posted by an organization ideologically opposed to copyright itself!
> Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.
What? Even if there are no copyright holders, the AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap.
Are you expecting the authors/publishers to send digital copies to AI companies directly? Or expecting AI companies to preserve the physical copies indefinitely? Both are not gonna happen, copyrighted or not.
If you're buying second hadn books by the lot, you'll get a lot of duplicates and its eaiser to scan wholesale and dedupe in the computers than it is to try to run a sorting operataion on "things".
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this is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...
The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed.
These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.