Humanity hasn't caught up to the reality of the times; we should adjust copyright laws so anything over say 10 years old can be hosted for free on the Internet. We should have colossal databases of music, books, movies, etc. that can be freely traded and downloaded without breaking any laws. Maybe in the past the commerical protection of art and IP was necessary but with the Internet and AI I think we need to, as a species, get over it and focus on information archival and dissemination over protecting income streams.
What's blowing my mind lately though is the people complaining about copyright today are some of the same people I saw 30 years ago screaming "Information wants to be free" and running around with the DeCSS code on their T-Shirts. But suddenly, now that they hate AI, copyright is important and the information should be locked away. I can't wait for this all to settle down.
far too often people care about things for purpose, not because they care. There are things of equal sorrow that don't get cared for because it serves no purpose. If your cause isn't ammunition for something that people already want to do then it will struggle to gain traction.
For example, nobody cared about data centre water or electricity use when it was serving us up cat pictures. Collectively the past 20 years of doing that is still significantly more use than AI data centres so far. We suddenly care about it because its anti-AI ammunition, not because we care.
It's possible to be opposed to excessive copyright and also be opposed to the mass theft of media for profit and subsequent abuse of copyright that the scrapers are guilty of. The AI pillagers are taking everything in, then gatekeeping access. And as they acknowledge with their "nothing after 2022" preferences, they (or their users at least) are salting the earth for future seekers of knowledge.
People must realize that it is easy to built some sentiment against on part of legislation that seems to restrict them, however, it is much more difficult to establish legislation that serves everyone. In the end we need smart people in politics and lawmaking instead of populists and libertarian cry-babies.
I think part of the problem is that current copyright law doesn't compensate artists, only mega corporations who figured out the right bureaucratic tricks (copyright assignment) to get paid in lieu of the artists.
I think it’s pretty clear in GP’s first sentence that they believe artists should get compensation during the first 10 years. I personally would change it to something more like 20 years but I share the idea.
On the surface it seems bad, although many of these books were probably rotting in place rather than being read. If the companies are willing to make the digital version available this may actually prreserve the books.
More troubling to me is the focus on pre-2022 data. This indicates that the companies are seriously worried about model collapse, where the future models become worse becuase they are being fed by generated data instead of real human data.
This is actually my worse case scenario for AI: the models become good enough to disrupt entire industries in the next 10 years, but then stay frozen at that level. Model drift then kicks in because the world will keep changing but the models do not, and in a few decades we actually regress instead of progress becuase they won't be enough skilled humans to drive advances.
Ancient Rome stopped creating aqueducts because they had all the ones they needed. They failed to pass that knowledge on to the next generation and so they just forgot how to create aqueducts.
Once AI starts making the majority of content, people will simply forget how to make content. Before we know it we're all fat slobs in floating chairs like in Wall-E.
Best case scenario I think is similar to what we see in Ian M. Banks Culture books where the machines basically take care of us out of the goodness of their hearts and we just kinda fuck off into obscurity.
That's the western world right now with manufacturing. Meanwhile China did the manufacturing and India is coming up, so it's not a lost skill globally.
The next generations are also losing computer skills, being brought up with devices that handhold you and have no opportunity for customisation and are essentially thin clients for mega corporations.
As long as economics incentivizes next quarter thinking nothing will be done. We can't even handle human portion of global warming which is arguably more important than just some AI model collapse scenario.
> If the companies are willing to make the digital version available this may actually prreserve the books.
They aren't. Point me to the links to the digital versions of the originals.
On the contrary, they're mangling the originals: "Character.ai, for example, offers a Books feature that permits users to rewrite public domain works such as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Frankenstein” by changing endings, settings, and inserting themselves into the narrative."
Anthropic: "We use a ‘soft codename’ for it because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this." If destroying old books were a public service, Anthropic wouldn't need to hide it.
Yeah, I really don't know where this goes from here. Like certain sources, particular Reddit and Twitter, have to largely be considered spoiled at this point. It's hard to quanitfy the amount of bots but my intuition tells me it's really high.
But changing how non-AI people write, that's an interesting angle. Because where do we go from here? In 100 years will we still be overvaluing pre-AI sources? That doesn't make sense. Of course a lot can (and will) change in 100 years.
But i'm reminded of pre-atomic steel, which is steel made before the first atomic bombs were detonated and thus have really low background radiation. This is necessary for making MRIs and such. People will go and find it from shipwrecks and such (ironically, many of which are from WW2). It's also a finite resource. What happens when we run out?
Now pre-2022 texts aren't consumed (other than destructively scanning books of course) but it is also finite. We can't make more of it.
When Google scanned its books, it did not destroy any of the books. This was because of the idea of the "cultural object" where the book has value as a physical artifact. The experience of reading a physical book is different than reading an electronic text. There is an argument that reading a book in its original form is better because it is closer to the original experience. This can also be said of records and tapes. The experience is designed to work in the original format. A book is a designed object with cultural significance. The container for the words can be as important as the actual words. There should be clearer distinctions and policies between mass market production where items can be destroyed and there will still be many of them left and unique and original content with limited copies available. This is not hard to do. Not to do it shows carelessness.
Yes, since we complained about them violating copyright so much, it does not violate copyright if they destroy the original, so they are now destroying the original. We got our demands met.
Edit(seriously):
>Transformativeness is a characteristic of such derivative works that makes them transcend, or place in a new light, the underlying works on which they are based. In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is often that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, which would otherwise remain unavailable.(Wikipedia)
I am sure Napster or the like argued that what they were doing was transformative.
Not sure how AI companies are arguing about PUBLIC benefit if you have to pay...
It has to be sufficiently transformed. Simply scanning it doesn't qualify. The legal system by contrast is leaning toward training of AI as being sufficiently transformative.
Right. But destroying a book even without making a copy is also allowed. It's very very common, in fact; something approaching a billion books are destroyed each year in the US.
It absolutely is. By destroying the original they retain the one copy they were licensed. It explicitly discusses that this was judged fair use in a court of law, because of the destruction of the original, as this becomes a transformation of the original work rather than a duplication.
Copying it. Because they clearly believe that they’re allowed to do so.
For physical books, they believe they’re not allowed to, hence the destruction.
It’s abhorrent, I agree… maybe if your world domination plan involves destroying rare books, you should change the plan rather than saying “well our hands our tied, the law says we have to”
I mean they used to have a different plan, which involved not destroying the books, and then they got sued for not destroying the books, by us, so now they are destroying the books. What did you think would happen?
One (1) company destroys and (illegally?) copies a rare book. This knowledge is now of that company, not of humanity. Other companies will feel the need to do the same and before you know it knowledge is walled off in the gardens of the AI companies, and the rare books are gone and destroyed.
But it ... won't be? The companies have no motivation to do so. The copyright on lots of these books are surely already expired, so if they wanted to they could be putting these up now. I'm sure internally this is viewed as a corpus of knowledge they have that their competitors do not, so they will not release them unless something forces them to.
I have a deep rooted doubt that "roughly everyone can now benefit from its content" If there's any value in the content it will immediately be monetized with an aggressive pay structure and had it sat in a library, that same value would be free.
> Roughly everyone can now benefit from its content.
You mean, roughly everyone who uses that particular model provider’s products. For truly rare books, this has an anticompetitive flavor, since it ensures others can’t train models from the same knowledge.
What do you imagine a rare book is? It's not the only extant copy of the writing in that book, in fact it's not even like it represents a significantly limited accessibility of that book.
I'm not really the most AI-friendly person around but this news cycle is just as equally annoying.
"Rare and out-of-print" is fabricating a lot of aura here. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) but I've yet seen evidence that these are culturally significant copies being destroyed for scanning.
> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
The oldest is from 1999! If that's the best they can actually enumerate to bolster this outrage farming cycle you could just wonder how irrelevant the rest are.
Really, please, kill this news cycle. There's a lot of issues deserving proper attention right now and this one is a straight-up nothingburger.
Because legally then it's a copy and not a format conversion.
This story has a lot of details left out and is a magnet for illinformed commentators: the reason the originals are destroyed is because it is legal to do so for the purposes of format conversion, but not legal to retain the originals under copyright law.
Yay capitalism! Imagine how much value is being created for shareholders by this destruction! Another example of "great work" being done!
Jokes aside, I don't know what I would do in this situation either. Maybe find a way to mark "rare" or "out of print" books and sell/auction the "pages"? Or make the scanned book available via some mechanism?
They are academic titles from the last few decades for the most part, and are rare because the print runs were typically short, and the prices typically eye-watering. “Semantic analysis of cotton processing terminology in Des Moines, 1993-1996, 8th edition”, that sort of fun.
Humanity hasn't caught up to the reality of the times; we should adjust copyright laws so anything over say 10 years old can be hosted for free on the Internet. We should have colossal databases of music, books, movies, etc. that can be freely traded and downloaded without breaking any laws. Maybe in the past the commerical protection of art and IP was necessary but with the Internet and AI I think we need to, as a species, get over it and focus on information archival and dissemination over protecting income streams.
10 years may be too little but generally I agree.
What's blowing my mind lately though is the people complaining about copyright today are some of the same people I saw 30 years ago screaming "Information wants to be free" and running around with the DeCSS code on their T-Shirts. But suddenly, now that they hate AI, copyright is important and the information should be locked away. I can't wait for this all to settle down.
far too often people care about things for purpose, not because they care. There are things of equal sorrow that don't get cared for because it serves no purpose. If your cause isn't ammunition for something that people already want to do then it will struggle to gain traction.
For example, nobody cared about data centre water or electricity use when it was serving us up cat pictures. Collectively the past 20 years of doing that is still significantly more use than AI data centres so far. We suddenly care about it because its anti-AI ammunition, not because we care.
It's possible to be opposed to excessive copyright and also be opposed to the mass theft of media for profit and subsequent abuse of copyright that the scrapers are guilty of. The AI pillagers are taking everything in, then gatekeeping access. And as they acknowledge with their "nothing after 2022" preferences, they (or their users at least) are salting the earth for future seekers of knowledge.
> It's possible to be opposed to excessive copyright
Define excessive. Who makes that determination and how?
the people who are opposed to it
People must realize that it is easy to built some sentiment against on part of legislation that seems to restrict them, however, it is much more difficult to establish legislation that serves everyone. In the end we need smart people in politics and lawmaking instead of populists and libertarian cry-babies.
I imagine you're in favor of the artists being compensated in some other way then? Or should they just suck it up?
I think part of the problem is that current copyright law doesn't compensate artists, only mega corporations who figured out the right bureaucratic tricks (copyright assignment) to get paid in lieu of the artists.
I think it’s pretty clear in GP’s first sentence that they believe artists should get compensation during the first 10 years. I personally would change it to something more like 20 years but I share the idea.
On the surface it seems bad, although many of these books were probably rotting in place rather than being read. If the companies are willing to make the digital version available this may actually prreserve the books.
More troubling to me is the focus on pre-2022 data. This indicates that the companies are seriously worried about model collapse, where the future models become worse becuase they are being fed by generated data instead of real human data.
This is actually my worse case scenario for AI: the models become good enough to disrupt entire industries in the next 10 years, but then stay frozen at that level. Model drift then kicks in because the world will keep changing but the models do not, and in a few decades we actually regress instead of progress becuase they won't be enough skilled humans to drive advances.
What would happen if we created large volumes of books with AI but faked their dates before 2022 to induce model collapse?
Entropy is a thing.
Ancient Rome stopped creating aqueducts because they had all the ones they needed. They failed to pass that knowledge on to the next generation and so they just forgot how to create aqueducts.
Once AI starts making the majority of content, people will simply forget how to make content. Before we know it we're all fat slobs in floating chairs like in Wall-E.
Best case scenario I think is similar to what we see in Ian M. Banks Culture books where the machines basically take care of us out of the goodness of their hearts and we just kinda fuck off into obscurity.
That's the western world right now with manufacturing. Meanwhile China did the manufacturing and India is coming up, so it's not a lost skill globally.
The next generations are also losing computer skills, being brought up with devices that handhold you and have no opportunity for customisation and are essentially thin clients for mega corporations.
As long as economics incentivizes next quarter thinking nothing will be done. We can't even handle human portion of global warming which is arguably more important than just some AI model collapse scenario.
> If the companies are willing to make the digital version available this may actually prreserve the books.
They aren't. Point me to the links to the digital versions of the originals.
On the contrary, they're mangling the originals: "Character.ai, for example, offers a Books feature that permits users to rewrite public domain works such as “Pride and Prejudice” and “Frankenstein” by changing endings, settings, and inserting themselves into the narrative."
Anthropic: "We use a ‘soft codename’ for it because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on this." If destroying old books were a public service, Anthropic wouldn't need to hide it.
Yeah, I really don't know where this goes from here. Like certain sources, particular Reddit and Twitter, have to largely be considered spoiled at this point. It's hard to quanitfy the amount of bots but my intuition tells me it's really high.
But changing how non-AI people write, that's an interesting angle. Because where do we go from here? In 100 years will we still be overvaluing pre-AI sources? That doesn't make sense. Of course a lot can (and will) change in 100 years.
But i'm reminded of pre-atomic steel, which is steel made before the first atomic bombs were detonated and thus have really low background radiation. This is necessary for making MRIs and such. People will go and find it from shipwrecks and such (ironically, many of which are from WW2). It's also a finite resource. What happens when we run out?
Now pre-2022 texts aren't consumed (other than destructively scanning books of course) but it is also finite. We can't make more of it.
There is good discussion on the previous thread from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
When Google scanned its books, it did not destroy any of the books. This was because of the idea of the "cultural object" where the book has value as a physical artifact. The experience of reading a physical book is different than reading an electronic text. There is an argument that reading a book in its original form is better because it is closer to the original experience. This can also be said of records and tapes. The experience is designed to work in the original format. A book is a designed object with cultural significance. The container for the words can be as important as the actual words. There should be clearer distinctions and policies between mass market production where items can be destroyed and there will still be many of them left and unique and original content with limited copies available. This is not hard to do. Not to do it shows carelessness.
Yes, since we complained about them violating copyright so much, it does not violate copyright if they destroy the original, so they are now destroying the original. We got our demands met.
That's not how copyright works, at all.
Yes, actually it is
I'm going to buy a Taylor Swift CD, rip it as MP3s, destroy the CD, and put the MP3s online...
Will I get sued?
The "putting it online" part is where you are f-ing up.
But it's transformed now!
Edit(seriously): >Transformativeness is a characteristic of such derivative works that makes them transcend, or place in a new light, the underlying works on which they are based. In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is often that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, which would otherwise remain unavailable.(Wikipedia)
I am sure Napster or the like argued that what they were doing was transformative.
Not sure how AI companies are arguing about PUBLIC benefit if you have to pay...
It has to be sufficiently transformed. Simply scanning it doesn't qualify. The legal system by contrast is leaning toward training of AI as being sufficiently transformative.
Destroying your copy of a copyrighted work does not violate copyright.
Format shifting is allowed. Making copies isn't. By destroying the original, it's format shifting.
Right. But destroying a book even without making a copy is also allowed. It's very very common, in fact; something approaching a billion books are destroyed each year in the US.
It absolutely is. By destroying the original they retain the one copy they were licensed. It explicitly discusses that this was judged fair use in a court of law, because of the destruction of the original, as this becomes a transformation of the original work rather than a duplication.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
So what are they doing about the online data they ingested?
Copying it. Because they clearly believe that they’re allowed to do so.
For physical books, they believe they’re not allowed to, hence the destruction.
It’s abhorrent, I agree… maybe if your world domination plan involves destroying rare books, you should change the plan rather than saying “well our hands our tied, the law says we have to”
I mean they used to have a different plan, which involved not destroying the books, and then they got sued for not destroying the books, by us, so now they are destroying the books. What did you think would happen?
There are plenty of scanners that do not destroy the book being scanned. Here is one, I am sure there are many others: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9LcTZU-HHI
It should be more than obvious, that the problem are not the scanners.
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127284
They should at least give the scanned copies to a non-profit or government entity to preserve and release them when the copyright expires.
It’s true that they’re destroying old books. The claim that they’re destroying rare books seems to be repeated without much in the way of evidence.
Forever preserving the content of a book by consuming one (1) copy of a rare book is the kind of thing we should be doing more of.
Roughly nobody would have had access to that copy. Roughly everyone can now benefit from its content.
One (1) company destroys and (illegally?) copies a rare book. This knowledge is now of that company, not of humanity. Other companies will feel the need to do the same and before you know it knowledge is walled off in the gardens of the AI companies, and the rare books are gone and destroyed.
The scan doesn't go away, and can be released when the copyright expires.
Oh no, a lump of cellulose is gone. Will no one think of the fibers?
> can be released when the copyright expires
But it ... won't be? The companies have no motivation to do so. The copyright on lots of these books are surely already expired, so if they wanted to they could be putting these up now. I'm sure internally this is viewed as a corpus of knowledge they have that their competitors do not, so they will not release them unless something forces them to.
I have a deep rooted doubt that "roughly everyone can now benefit from its content" If there's any value in the content it will immediately be monetized with an aggressive pay structure and had it sat in a library, that same value would be free.
> Roughly everyone can now benefit from its content.
You mean, roughly everyone who uses that particular model provider’s products. For truly rare books, this has an anticompetitive flavor, since it ensures others can’t train models from the same knowledge.
Where can I read any of these destroyed copies from anthropic?
What do you imagine a rare book is? It's not the only extant copy of the writing in that book, in fact it's not even like it represents a significantly limited accessibility of that book.
It's going to be hard for you to do more of that, considering that AI forms are destroying the books. You know, the whole point of the article...
Roughly Anthropic owners benefit from the content, unless the scans are made available somehow.
> Roughly everyone can now benefit from its content.
You mean every Anthropic?
I'm not really the most AI-friendly person around but this news cycle is just as equally annoying.
"Rare and out-of-print" is fabricating a lot of aura here. It's technically correct (the best kind of correct) but I've yet seen evidence that these are culturally significant copies being destroyed for scanning.
From https://nltimes.nl/2026/06/25/rare-book-dealers-fear-tech-fi...:
> The attachment contained 3,000 English-language titles organized by ISBN number, including books such as Distinct Element Modelling in Geomechanics by K.R. Saxena (1999); Barrett's Traditional Fairy Tales (2021), an academic study of Irish folklore; and Laser Shock Peening of Advanced Ceramics by Pratik Shukla (2018).
The oldest is from 1999! If that's the best they can actually enumerate to bolster this outrage farming cycle you could just wonder how irrelevant the rest are.
Really, please, kill this news cycle. There's a lot of issues deserving proper attention right now and this one is a straight-up nothingburger.
Why don't they just put the pdf versions on Internet Archives? Then they would at least be preserved for the future
Why don't they rebind them and put it back in some library? They don't have to throw it out.
Because legally then it's a copy and not a format conversion.
This story has a lot of details left out and is a magnet for illinformed commentators: the reason the originals are destroyed is because it is legal to do so for the purposes of format conversion, but not legal to retain the originals under copyright law.
That would be illegal.
Who knew Ray Bradbury could be so wrong.
Not all books are sacrosanct. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that they are destroying rare and valuable books.
Yay capitalism! Imagine how much value is being created for shareholders by this destruction! Another example of "great work" being done!
Jokes aside, I don't know what I would do in this situation either. Maybe find a way to mark "rare" or "out of print" books and sell/auction the "pages"? Or make the scanned book available via some mechanism?
You could “ingest” them all into a “model” and sell access to the information within them via “token usage”
Nowhere are the supposed rare books listed.
Confuses "(not all that) old books" with "rare books".
Ragebait, nothing more.
They are academic titles from the last few decades for the most part, and are rare because the print runs were typically short, and the prices typically eye-watering. “Semantic analysis of cotton processing terminology in Des Moines, 1993-1996, 8th edition”, that sort of fun.
I'm reminded of a quote that's been (mis)attributed to Dorothy Parker.
"This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force."