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Comment by zirkonit | Hacker News Reader

Our family volunteers at a nonprofit that moves a huge number of books. We take donations and run massive charity sales, clearing tens of thousands of books a month. Pricing works like a ladder: you try to sell a book for a couple of bucks, then for a dollar, then by the $5 bag, then for free, and you still end up with thousands of books nobody wants even at no cost. These used to go straight to pulp. Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.

I'm sure the Anthropics of the world have shredded the last known copies of plenty of titles. But nobody talks about the last known copies that get pulped every day simply because there are so many books nobody wants and storing them is expensive.

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My wife loves bulk book hauls. Those places that we frequent, work like a literal permanent discount warehouse - books in high shelves, on pallets, everywhere. Often hundreds of issues of the same one.

But there is so many books there that no one want's to read. Hundreds of the same book lying there for months or years.

Same for public book-sharing "libraries" (small shelves that look like bird house, usually in parks etc). People really like them and there are many in my city, but most books there are products of a gone era and a gone mindset. No one want's that even for free.

We were taught respect for books, but not everything is worth preserving.

I didn't go this year but my local town library has a book sale where books go for something like $10/bag. I donate some books to them throughout the year. There are still a lot of books available on the last or second to last day of the sale. I'm sure a huge number get pulped.

A few days back, I spent some time going through a World Book encyclopaedia set that my parents had bought for me when I was 4. It was basically an expensive investment back then into what would turn into a lifelong reading habit.

Most of the information in it is practically worthless today unfortunately - Saddam Hussein still alive, as were Katharine Hepburn and King Hussein of Jordan, no mention of Ceres and Pluto was still a planet, and the Internet and software had barely a mention. Most articles had less information than a standard Wikipedia article.

That being said, the way information was presented in them still outshines anything one may find on the internet today. Even the simple elements - neat diagrams and relevant images, proper sectioning and organization of the text, footnotes to other relevant articles...

Long gone are the days when I would simply take a bowl of ice cream and a volume and just read it end to end.

A lot of these books are reference titles that are outdated to the point of uselessness and/or weren't that great/interesting when they were new. Not many people have interest in or use for textbooks from the 50s.

I have a similar thought too each time I walk past piles of discount books.

I'm in the camp that perhaps it's healthy to not grasp onto every bit of information. that some artifacts dying a natural death is maybe just the way things are

Well, they could turn the bad faith story into a good faith story by making them available for everyone to download perhaps. (AI companies "saving" old books!) But that would require giving a s*t which they don't and that is the real problem imho.

They legally cannot do this.

That certainly hasn’t stopped them before… IP theft is kind of their whole thing, isn’t it?

Distributing copyrighted works (prior to expiration of their copyright) verbatim is illegal.

Training an LLM on copyrighted works is not illegal.

This whole debate has been tried in court already. Calling it IP theft only stands on individual moral grounds, but the law allows for derivative works.

Google attempted to do this 15 years ago, they got sued and stopped. It turns out that tech companies occasionally do have to follow the law, you'd think people would be happier about that...

Wait, if you’re talking about the Google Books case, Google won. Maybe they made adjustments on how they served results but they certainly did not stop.

The Google Books settlement was originally going to make Google into a clearinghouse for scans of out-of-print books. The scans would have been available for individuals to purchase for a reasonable price, and libraries and institutions would have been able to subscribe to a service that would give patrons access to the full text of every book. This deal fell apart because some research libraries and authors argued this was anti-competitive, as anyone wanting to make a competing service would have to go through the same process as Google of settling a class action lawsuit. They instead wanted Congress to pass a law to free up the rights to orphaned books. No progress on this was subsequently made because nobody in Congress cares enough about the rights to out-of-print books to get legislation passed. The whole reason why they're out of print when ebooks and print-on-demand exist is that they won't get enough sales to make it worth the time and money to figure out who the royalties should go to. The result is that nobody outside Google gets to see the full Google Books scans.

Those scans are held at HathiTrust Research Center https://www.hathitrust.org/about/research-center/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust

> HathiTrust Digital Library is a large-scale collaborative repository of digital content from research libraries, administered by the University of Michigan. Its holdings include content digitized via Google Books and the Internet Archive digitization initiatives, as well as content digitized locally by libraries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...

> Authors Guild, Inc. v. HathiTrust (2014) was a following case related to HathiTrust, a project by the libraries of the Big Ten Academic Alliance and the University of California systems that combined their digital library collections with those of Google's Book Search. The HathiTrust case differed in two primary factors which were raised by the plaintiffs: that for viewers with disabilities, they could view the scanned text through a screen reader to make it easier to read, and offering to print out the scans as replacement copies for members of the universities if they could verify their original copies were lost or damaged. Both uses were deemed also to be fair use by the Second Circuit.

> The subject of the copyright of orphan works – works that may still be under copyright but with no identifiable rights holder – was a significant point of debate after both this and HathiTrust. Normally, libraries have been hesitant to loan digital copies of orphaned works as libraries may be liable for copyright violations should the copyright owner step forward to claim ownership.

The bill on orphan works that didn't pass was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shawn_Bentley_Orphan_Works_Act...

https://www.hathitrust.org/the-collection/search-access/copy...

And there are exceptions for copyrighted works allowing them to lend them out.

> Protected by copyright law, but made available: Protected by copyright law but made available on a strictly limited basis in accordance with the statutory limitations including, but not limited to, Section 107 provisions for fair use, Section 108 provisions for libraries and archives, and the rights provided to registered users with disabilities. In the absence of an applicable exception, no further reproduction or distribution is permitted by any means without the permission of the copyright holder. Lawful uses of works are provided only under the following conditions ...

Scanning still continues. https://www.hathitrust.org/member-libraries/contribute-conte... - though it's not at the same rate as it was during google books project.

That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.

People obviously feel bad about companies doing this. People reading these stories don't care what's legal, they care what's ethical. Heck, re-publishing long lost material would make AI companies heroes instead of bad guys.

> That would require effort (to sort, acquire copyright, etc) which they wouldn't put in. Because they don't care.

I don't think you have any idea how expensive it is to acquire the copyright for a single book with the intent of making it freely available online. That's equivalent to asking the rights holders to perpetually forgo all possible earnings from the material, and they expect to be compensated accordingly. Even paying lawyers to begin assembling what's needed to make this happen would be five figures per book to get started.

They legally cannot scan them in entirety either but they are.

Again, under Bartz v Anthropic they can scan and train on whatever they want, as long as the original is lost in the process.

TIL thanks.

What I would do is announce that the scans are being preserved and will donated to the library of congress or whatever other institution is legally able to hold onto stuff like this. But that would more directly tie specific companies to the practice of destroying unwanted old books, so nobody's going to do it, or even announce it.

The Library of Congress already has a copy of the book.

The library of congress does not have copies of random japanese books.

That would be National Diet Library https://www.ndl.go.jp/en/

https://www.ndl.go.jp/en/collect/deposit/deposit

Both Anthropic and Internet Archive have gotten sued into oblivion by publishing companies once, there's no way they're going to do something even more flagrantly illegal

Why do they shred them at all instead of donating or selling them again?

A judge ruled it was OK to scan books and save the scanned copy if you shred the physical book afterwards.

The judge ruled that format shifting was fair use. The fair use argument was enhanced because the original was destroyed. Hypothetically, one could do only the format shifting and keep the original - but the original could not be sold or donated or otherwise given away because then the format shifted copy would not be fair use.

I can burn DVD copies of my old VHS tapes. I cannot then give away the old VHS tapes or sell them at a garage sale. If I keep them, they're cluttering the shelf... so the VHS tape gets thrown away afterwards.

My understanding is they cut off the binding for scanning. They'd have to resell it donate by the page

They have to destroy the copy either way for it to be fair use (according to Bartz v Anthropic). Cutting the bindings off is already the faster method to scan, and once you're required to pulp the original anyway, it becomes a no-brainer.

The wording doesn't exactly say that. https://www.akingump.com/a/web/h6WFidTYyTnoNEPehPXMYu/auvY7D...

The relevant part of the ruling starts on page 27.

    For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.
    The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital.

Fair use favors the destruction to avoid accidental surplus copying of the source material. It doesn't require it. If Anthropic put everything in a warehouse, they could keep it in the warehouse... but they couldn't do anything with them afterwards. They couldn't sell them as books or donate them as that would mean that it wasn't fair use and copyright infringement would have taken place once that additional copy was distributed again. At that point, fair use and economics both favor destroying the original.

If I make a DVD copy of an old VHS tape that I own, that's fair use format shifting. I can keep the VHS tape without issue. I cannot donate it to the library or put it out in a garage sale. When I got rid of my VHS player, I threw out VHS tapes too since they were of no use and only cluttered my shelf.

Yea, there are a ton of people that seem they'd rather the books get lost forever than be looked at by an AI company.

> Now they go to AI labs for scanning. Would we rather they were read, or at least owned, by someone? Yes. Is scanning better than turning them into toilet paper? Yes, even if only marginally.

Yeah, now instead of old books being turned into toilet paper, we'll get turned into toilet paper. Much better.

But Sam Altman will become richer than God, and isn't that what really matters?

But don't worry! You'll still have access to ChatGPT until your savings run out.

Do you have an actual point about scanning the books, or are you just using this as a soapbox to rant about AI and Sam Altman?

Yes, you missed it. Perhaps you should read it again until you get it?

Again, do you have an actual objection to the subject of the article, or are you just mad it enriches people you don't like?

> Again, do you have an actual objection to the subject of the article

I was responding to a comment, which apparently is another thing you missed. Maybe work on not doing that, instead of snarkily asking for everything to be carefully spelled out to you?

> or are you just mad it enriches people you don't like?

Nice strawman, pity if someone knocked it down.

Okay, so all you have are personal attacks, goodbye.

> Okay, so all you have are personal attacks, goodbye.

Note: I made no personal attacks.

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