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Comment by nloomans | Hacker News Reader

> a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere

somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers”

the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies.

> If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more.

archivists keep everything, because we don't know right now what will be important 100 years from now.

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> somewhere were we can't access it

By any metric imaginable, it's making the information more accessible, not less. First, it's taking a single copy of a 10k physical print and it's making it digital. Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.

Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

I happen to actually actively shop second hand bookstores, so I am potentially affected by this - as opposed to most people complaining because they don't like the idea. And I still absolutely support it.

>Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

Help me understand how. Not only are these LLMs expressly prohibited from specifically regurgitating copyright works if the users asks them to, but they habitually hallucinate or paraphrase things wrong.

If they won't regurgitate the copyrighted text verbatim, and are known to be confidently incorrect and hallucinatory, I'm struggling to see how these texts are "immediately available to literally billions".

And I ask this as someone who has had LLMs give me incorrect assertions about the contents of books.

Depends upon what you want.

For example, knowledge about how the book smells when you open it, something that reader do talk about enough I don't think this should be a strawman, is lost. But, that is about the experience of reading the book, not the knowledge of the book.

The exact text? Yeah, I think that is largely lost as well. This is a summary. And for rarer books, it will be a particularly bad summary. The basics of the book are being captured in a space that the right question that retrieve it, but worse than a sparksnote and any well read reader will tell you all the sorts of things a sparknotes already loses compared to reading the book directly.

But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before, and future LLMs should get better at giving the information. So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of. If it was between this and a sparksnote of the book being made, the sparksnote is far better, but between this and the book simply being disposed of, then the LLM is better but far, far from great.

That's a lot of assumptions that goes into the judgment, which is probably why different people reach different conclusions. One person is imagine the alternate fate of this book being slowly rotting in a landfill, the other resting on a bookshelf where it is read at least once fully and then flipped through time to time, and neither are wrong.

> But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before,

No, it’s not. Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost, which is a fucking tragedy because they don’t have to be. Even if you’re not willing to take the time to scan every page in a cradle scanner, as rare books should be, (and don’t tell me they don’t have the money to get a handful of library interns to do this,) you can disbind the books and store them as they did in the Caselaw Access Project at Harvard Law. They removed the pages from the binding, scanned them on a high speed conveyor belt scanner which yielded full color 600 DPI jp2 images, placed the pages back in the binding like a folio that could be re-bound if needed, vacuum sealed them, and stored them in a salt mine. It’s not like it was slow, either — we did 40k in 18 months and we did take the time to scan the rare ones with a cradle scanner. And we did it all in less than open AI probably spends in a day on inference.

> So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of.

That’s a false dichotomy. Libraries exist for this exact reason, and their not already having a copy does not make “you snooze you lose” a morally acceptable strategy.

I’ve been pretty cool on the direction of SV for the past decade at least, but I am absolutely gobsmacked by the unbridled hubris of these companies over the past 5 years.

> Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost

I understand what you mean but... "permanently lost" sounds dramatic. When I trow away old pictures, old drawings or pieces made by my son at school, they are lost as well. Not that I do that often, but it begs the question, should every 'ip' made by humans be preserved?

It sounds dramatic because it’s dramatic. You’re combining two things — whether something is, in fact, completely lost, and if it is something that should be kept. Something that should not be kept is still completely lost if it’s destroyed. It’s difficult to imagine they’d digitize it if it was worthless.

>all of these things are permanently lost

A small fraction of them is saved in the model. Far more is saved in the digitized copy as long as they keep it which they have plenty of incentives to do so (future training of newer models).

That's more than what happens if that book was burned or sent to a landfill, but less than if the book is giving a loving home.

>They removed the pages from the binding, scanned them on a high speed conveyor belt scanner which yielded full color 600 DPI jp2 images, placed the pages back in the binding like a folio that could be re-bound if needed, vacuum sealed them, and stored them in a salt mine.

My understanding is that this simply isn't legally allowed for these books. The original must be destroyed for the digital copy to not be copyright infringement.

>That’s a false dichotomy.

I pointed out there is a spread of possible outcomes and that different people are considering different outcomes and the comparison of if this is good or bad depends upon which outcome one considers. I even mention that both outcomes are sometimes right. That's about as far from a false dichotomy as I can see it.

> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws,

> Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

Isn't this a contradiction? I mean, maybe you can invoke a fair use policy if an LLM spits out some text from the scanned book, but then you are _not_ "making it available to literally billions".

> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed.

I don't if that is true: a lot of old books might still have copy or other rights associated to them, likely owned by author and/or publisher, directly or inherited, but often those who have the rights do not have digital or physical copies at hand anymore (some old books are, well, really old). Does Anthropic make sure to track down, contact and then share the digital copy they make with those who have rights on the work? If not, they are not making it in any way easier to re-print the books, while making their supply more scarce (they destroy existing embodiments).

> Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. Or be useful and scan book for Anna archive and other shadow libraries.

Citizen's lobbying against megacorp is a mirage.

>But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.

By what metric ? The copy is now guarded by a company instead of being on the second hand market.

You really drank all the Koolaid they had to offer.

Destroying the last copy of a book is OK because you shop for second hand books, and because some private company hold the last digital copy and have no incentive to make sure it survives. Damn..

> permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers

History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent.

Provided a set of information has value (which in this case it clearly does) then the overwhelming likelihood is that, eventually, through some method or other, the information will become public.

> History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent.

If you destroy the only copy of a physical artifact, the situation is as permanent as it can get.

I mean books get destroyed all the time, really they are a major pain in the ass to keep together, especially as they age. Paper loves to crumble. Insects think they are tasty. Floods and fire love destroying them too.

So physical books are rather non-permanent themselves.

Exactly. Calling anything on an SSD permanent is criminal.

I wonder if Anthropic could rent or sell access to their collection to the internet archive? It would probably be a good PR move (which they probably need right now), but I'm not sure what type of legal shenanigans they would need to do in order to not violate copyright law.

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