> As mentioned elsewhere, this is also IP theft on a massive scale.
Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?
So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it.
I'm sure people would prefer if Amazon also offered library-like access to the book, but how is it theft? I'm not asking about "any possible logic" - he called it theft.
That is also my understanding of the claim, and I would intuitively agree with it.
Ok, but it's a bit different because they are not selling "the book" they are selling a fundamentally different thing for which the book is consumable input. Let's consider a batch of 5000 books. For kicks let's assume the known copies are N=1 for those books. Today, though only a few people can do this at a time, a person can purchase one of those books once read exactly the text in that book, and keep doing so to their heart's content. Or maybe a library buys it and now a rotating legion of people can do that for free. Now let's say amazon buys and scans them, destroying them in the process and refusing to release scans to avoid giving competitors a training edge. Now:
- You can never get the information as written again. At best you'll get an LLM output approximation/mutation of it. If this was the expression of a real human beings lived experience, that's kind of sad and goes against one of the spirited aspects of human existence, to leave a legacy, doesn't it? - Amazon is going to charge you per token every time you want to access that information. - Price demand for the information is now tied up with general demand for LLMs rather than the actual book, either reducing or greatly inflating the cost to you in addition to the now recurring charges.
So, now you (a) can't actually ever access that book as it was written (b) need to pay continually to access an approximation of its contents (c) and possibly more than the book is worth since now it's "value" in a price sense has been absorbed into general llm inference costs.
Not to mention you may have eradicated the last extant copy of a person's memoirs, but I guess it's pretty clear people in this industry don't care at this point. I hope one day your entire life story is ground up and consumed in some data farming operation and you are all summarily forgotten.
They're intended to be analogous of reality.
Which real-world company is said to be buying all existing copies of a book, here?
However, the recent headlines have been about "rare" books, of which it can therefore be assumed that few copies remain, and fewer of those (possibly none) would be accessible to the public if they are in the hands of collectors or long-time buyers.
As an author, I know some of my own books didn't sell and probably exist by now in small enough quantities that if you destroyed the boxes in my apartment, and bought the last single copy still available used on Amazon, nobody's ever getting their hands on the other few that might be surviving in a couple of basements here and there.
Deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book is deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book. That's not a thing that appears to be happening; there's no face-value to talk about here, is there? Or are we just discussing left-field hypotheticals?
Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :)
As a voluminous writer myself, this is something that I do care about.
Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes.
Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copies of the book, scans it, destroys the original, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Other copies still exist, but they're now marginally harder to find and the corporation gives no credit to the source in their product and marketing.
Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge.
Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"?
> Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :)
Sadly, I'm moving and a bunch of those books are going to get turned into pulp as I'm not going to keep lugging them around the world with me for the rest of my life. Where are the Archive guys when I need them?
I can't answer that as-asked. I am but one person; I do not represent anyone but myself and I'm not about to pretend to know what others may or may not think.
But I will say that no, I do not consider this scenario to be theft. Nobody was stolen from. A physical item was purchased from another party, and the new owner of that item did what they wanted with it.
If you or I or Corporation A buy one of these rare books and use it as toilet paper, or to cut up and make little paper boats out of, then: Still no theft.
Furthermore, maybe I buy your grandfather's rare book from a yard sale and use it to learn about the amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Or I borrow a copy from the library. Either way: The book is legitimately in my hands and I'm reading it. I'm learning from it.
I integrate that method (your grandfather's method!) into my little pea-sized brain's model of life, the universe, and everything.
And then: I write about the method I learned about. Maybe I publish a zillion copies and scatter them as leaflets that blanket the Earth, or I make one single-copy gilded print that I sell for a zillion dollars, or I set the scribes forth at dawn to duplicate it onto scrolls of Charmin to use as toilet paper.
That's still not theft.
In terms of copyright (which is also not an issue of theft): Copyright doesn't protect ideas. Perhaps it should, but it does not.
This is not happening. They want the text, nothing more. Depriving others isn't the goal, based on all empirical evidence about their behavior. It's about one each of every ISBN.
"AI training is infringement" is not exactly a copyright-maximalist view. The explicit training task used for pre-training is reproducing the content of the trained-on books; and models trained on such books are able to reproduce significant infringing chunks of them[0] unless specifically post-trained to refuse to do so.
Additionally, they might have thought that Controlled Digital Lending was OK (it wasn't, but that's a different issue to AI training). As I've mentioned elsewhere in this thread, there's a common misconception that copyright is concerned with the number of copies in circulation as opposed to individual acts of copying.
Or they don't care about any of that and just wanted to highlight the hypocrisy.
[0] Which, under the "compression is intelligence" point of view, is entirely expected and not surprising in the slightest.