Ask HN: How is AI destruction of books legal? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How is AI destruction of books legal?

1 pointMadmallard10 comments

I'm talking about Anthropic and other AI companies finding rare books, feeding their pages into the model training data, and then shredding the books afterward.

They are destroying history actively. It reminds me of religious people claiming these people really are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Surely this should be treated very harshly and stopped??? I don't want novels to disappear, especially rare ones?

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The way the laws are written, you have the right to digitize books that you own physical copies of. If your physical copy is destroyed, you retain ownership of the digital copy. But the moment you transfer ownership of the physical copy to someone else, you no longer have the right to your digital copy.

You're asking how it's legal for them to remove books from circulation, when that's the only way under the current laws for them to obtain permanent digital copies, legally.

Yes, and that law breaks down when it's an entity with billions of dollars that can acquire millions of books. That no longer is reasonable. Now it's destruction of historical significance.

There is no law about destructively scanning your own books. If you would like to preserve a book, buy it and send it to the Internet Archive for non destructive scanning and long term physical archival. It's very easy to do so, as someone who sends them books.

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

https://help.archive.org/help/does-the-internet-archive-have...

thank you for the resource

If you have any specific books in mind that you would like archived that the Internet Archive has not done yet, drop the ISBNs in a reply and I’ll acquire and ship them for archiving.

https://archive.org/want/?mode=donation_book

Did they purchase the books legally? Is their plan to destroy every copy of every book ever, and if it were, would that even be possible?

Its private property. I don't like it either, but I wouldn't like intrusive laws either.

private property is a nonsense concept if state level wealth allows someone to buy out everything

I can destroy anything that I own. So can they. They're despicable for doing this, but there's nothing remotely illegal about it.

Not everything bad should be illegal, because sometimes outlawing a thing can have greater adverse consequences than the thing itself. Some things are better handled through social rejection.

nonsense when they can spend billions of dollars

are u even thinking through what you're saying?

oh hey we can buy up all housing in these cities and then just destroy it and make it uninhabitable

what a joke

in no universe should that be allowed

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