- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.
ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.
“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”
Copyright. They mustn’t make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it’s okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that’s why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one’s charging you rent for using some data, then it’s “unethical”.
The Internet Archive absolutely does not destroy books. They scan them the hard way with the binding still intact.
I was misremembering. Google won the precedent, when they were suing over Google Books. IA had only 1 big lawsuit and were forced to settle. The non-destructive scanning is dicey.