Whatever judge ruled that it was legal to scan and use books if and only if you DESTROY a copy of the book was truly a moron. The law gets bent by judges all the time to be practical and fair, they should have used this opportunity to give a more sane ruling.
The result is moronic but given the confines a judge is operating what else could he do? Is it legal for you to buy a book and tear it down? The problem is the law, and the people who vote for the legislative bodies not asking more from their representatives.
Books are seemingly more expensive than ever but paradoxically declining in material and substantial quality (i.e., are poorly edited and printed). Buying used books is just good financial sense.
I don't know about globally but in the US anything that isn't sure to be a mass market item is going to be print on demand. While there's some perfectly good print on demand out there, it's often of lower quality than conventional printing.
Exactly this. I'm not entirely certain AI has anything to do with it but my last book purchases have been entirely used.
Our local independent book shop got together with a couple other dozen and started a used book platform. If I have a book I don't want, I'll let them know, if they have a buyer, I just bring it to them and get a small amount of money. They take a fee for the handling and everyone's happy.
A used book is usually max half the price of new and there is a decently wide selection.
A lot of online retailers have also started stocking used books as a cheaper alternative.
It's because of American law. If it were sane, everyone could share. Instead, if there are 25 copies of a book in existence, 25 different AI companies could buy them and pulp them. Woe be it if some company's lawyer has decided that they need to buy a new copy for each model they train.
Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.
If there are only 25 copies and it's impossible to buy a new copy from the publisher, who's actually getting hurt if you "pirate" that book? How can anyone claim losses if they clearly don't want your money for a new copy.
Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase.
The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.
One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.
The issue people have with it isn't about copyright. It's about how offensive it is that AI companies are mass buying and then destroying physical books by the millions. It's the same reason people were outraged when those two fools chopped down the ancient Sycamore tree at Hadrian's Wall. "But it's just a tree!"
No, it isn't. It's much, much more than that. There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature. Whether they paid people for the books is completely besides the point.
As the author of several comprehensively obsolete books on programming, I'd be honored to have the spine cut off and to have them digitized, as if there were still some value in the words and code my co-authors and I created those years ago. Otherwise they'd be pulped or used as kindling anyway.
Whatever judge ruled that it was legal to scan and use books if and only if you DESTROY a copy of the book was truly a moron. The law gets bent by judges all the time to be practical and fair, they should have used this opportunity to give a more sane ruling.
The result is moronic but given the confines a judge is operating what else could he do? Is it legal for you to buy a book and tear it down? The problem is the law, and the people who vote for the legislative bodies not asking more from their representatives.
I thought they were destroyed just because they rip out the spine to scan them more easily?
What was the supposed reasoning there? That the company can’t resell the books to profit or let others read or scan them?
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Books are seemingly more expensive than ever but paradoxically declining in material and substantial quality (i.e., are poorly edited and printed). Buying used books is just good financial sense.
I don't know about globally but in the US anything that isn't sure to be a mass market item is going to be print on demand. While there's some perfectly good print on demand out there, it's often of lower quality than conventional printing.
Exactly this. I'm not entirely certain AI has anything to do with it but my last book purchases have been entirely used.
Our local independent book shop got together with a couple other dozen and started a used book platform. If I have a book I don't want, I'll let them know, if they have a buyer, I just bring it to them and get a small amount of money. They take a fee for the handling and everyone's happy. A used book is usually max half the price of new and there is a decently wide selection.
A lot of online retailers have also started stocking used books as a cheaper alternative.
Is that really the case? Anecdotally but I remember new releases cost more historically.
We're no longer an economy that produces things to be consumed, but rather one that produces things that increase consumption.
Could be the makings of a dark age.
It's because of American law. If it were sane, everyone could share. Instead, if there are 25 copies of a book in existence, 25 different AI companies could buy them and pulp them. Woe be it if some company's lawyer has decided that they need to buy a new copy for each model they train.
Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.
The copyright law here is broken in general.
If there are only 25 copies and it's impossible to buy a new copy from the publisher, who's actually getting hurt if you "pirate" that book? How can anyone claim losses if they clearly don't want your money for a new copy.
Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase.
The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.
One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.
The issue people have with it isn't about copyright. It's about how offensive it is that AI companies are mass buying and then destroying physical books by the millions. It's the same reason people were outraged when those two fools chopped down the ancient Sycamore tree at Hadrian's Wall. "But it's just a tree!"
No, it isn't. It's much, much more than that. There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature. Whether they paid people for the books is completely besides the point.
As the author of several comprehensively obsolete books on programming, I'd be honored to have the spine cut off and to have them digitized, as if there were still some value in the words and code my co-authors and I created those years ago. Otherwise they'd be pulped or used as kindling anyway.