- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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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.
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.”
They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.
So what they’re saying is, we should start making as many legit-looking books full of bullshit and gibberish as possible, then send them to Nevada where they can be used to help “train” their AI.
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.
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.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Anthropic - I want to convert it to weights for use in massive matrix multiplication operations.
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.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Google - I want to convert it to a searchable database of terms that can refer you to the correct ISBN.
And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it’s just under a different framework known as the DMCA.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to watch the movie.
That’s not transformative.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to take clips to make memes.
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.
The articles are oversimplifying because the law is impossibly complex, but the moral hazard is obvious.
It’s like they’re murdering orphans and someone tries to argue it’s actually state sanctioned manslaughter.
books can’t be used to feed people, unlike dead orphans
It’s not impossibly complex. You’ve just had it explained to you pretty well and succinctly.
No, it’s impossibly complex so lets scan and trash all the law books so AI can figure out how to legislate AI
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.
Copyright law is not some philosophically derived right it’s literally just a government granted Monopoly that was invented in the 1700s because printers wanted dibs on books. It literally serves Now function other than giving advantages to our corporate overlords
token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid
only if you destroy the original i guess
(the real answer is that copyright is and always has been a tool for corporations to control the ownership of culture. what ai companies are doing isn’t fine in the eye of the state because it’s “transformative”, it’s fine in the eyes of the state because they’re corporations selling their products)
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?
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
just remember. the planet is going to be just fine.
remember how quickly wildlife came back when covid shutdowns hit? it’ll be like that when the last human dies.
The last human will be descendant of billionaires who’s lineage lived underground for 8 generations
Great. The ants, cockroaches and rats will fight over world domination once we drove nearly everything else into extinction. That‘s so reassuring. I only ever cared about the ants anyway. /s
I genuinely don‘t give a shit about the 99% of the planet that isn‘t it‘s outer crust so obviously I don‘t care if „the planet will be fine“ either. That‘s not mine or your world. Neither is anything that happens in millions of years after pretty much every species we ever knew is no longer there. It‘s such a straw man argument. Nobody is talking about what that clown was talking about when saying „the planet“ and he knew it.
you’re thinking too small scale.
in 150 million years after humans who knows what kind of life will evolve.
Nobody knows and nobody cares. That‘s not our fight.
hence the attitude of, “the planet is fine, people are fucked”.
I ask people every now and then, the theme of the answer is similar: one stop shopping, it’s easier than looking elsewhere, answering with the question where else am I going to go? People tend to take the shortest path between A and B.
There are some things you can only find there, sure, but there’s more of a shopping dopamine hit if you look around. Other retailers do exist. Most of the time you can find it elsewhere.
I do most of my shopping through eBay, although some of the sellers use Amazon for fulfillment. They’re hard to avoid entirely.
I miss electronics shops :( The chain and small hobby shops around me don’t carry things like resistors and capacitors. I checked every single one. Really.
Then I bought a lifetime supply of resistors, like actual hundreds, and it was delivered to my doorstep in under 6 hours for $8.
I dont miss paying extra just because its a local shop and they get to gouge
Just change one other mind. If everyone did the same they would be gone in no time. Do two and it will be done even sooner.
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
Nothing good ever came of destroying books.
Amazon never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity
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!!!
Where I draw the line for whether it is ethical to light things on fire is when they start destroying rare knowledge and books as fast as possible for no other reason than to hoard and obscure knowledge for private benefit.
It is one thing to fund the creation of knowledge and then hoard it, it is entirely another to begin actively attacking and destroying pre-existing publicly shared resources of knowledge in the pursuit of monetizing access to that very knowledge behind a gargantuan profit motivated entity.
They’re destroying the books because it’s cheaper than scanning them intact.
They’re not acquiring actual knowledge, simply the most likely next word.
