From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge.
Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available. As stated in my first paragraph, they are not the exclusive stewards of humanity despite them anointing themselves as such. Granted, a lot of these books might not be that useful, but still a relic of times pre-machine generated text, which makes them valuable if only for their archival value.
> The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.
So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal digital copy of a work but then you cannot resell the hard copy and keep the digital one. Same principle applies here.
They literally lie, cheat and steal at any opportunity they have and in any way that they think of. Do not trust a single thing that they say; it is a fool's folly to do so.
A lot of this can already be said about a lot of companies, especially almost any large company, but it goes doubly if not triply so for this new breed of company now.
Aren't the copyright laws forcing them to do this the very ones that would make such archives illegal? The books that could be in such an archive are the books that don't need to be destroyed.
Come on, we did without AI for all our history, we could live without it with no issue (as to me we could live without smartphones, internet, etc if we want).
I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...
Overall , smells like propaganda. How many books on earth you can openly buy that has practical “knowledge” value , not just historical one , and exist only in one physical implementation ( book ) . There were numbers of initiatives for a decade to digitalize all valuable knowledge
After around 2000 books started coming out in digital format, so at least there are digital copies of many of those, even if they are still under copyright.
Why on earth would they? Ultimate point for these companies is to make a ton of money, obviously they won't shoot themselves in the foot and give away whatever advantage they have, especially not to a free archive which is about doing good in the world, which probably isn't profitable enough for a company to care about.
I ask "Why save physical books?"
If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.
Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribution is worthless.
I disagree with putting books on a pedestal and saying they must be protected. If they were any good, they would stand on their own, but if we have to run a moral crusade to save them, perhaps we are all better off if they're destroyed.
The Gutenberg bible is rare, its content is not rare, and some would argue that the content itself is not valuable, and yet the Gutenberg bible is valuable.
Same can be said about many books.
Which is really why the outrage cycle over Anthropic's actions is largely misplaced.
They have done zero to destroy the durability. In fact, it’s probably more durable.
If the physical copies are scarce, that is due to the publisher and copyright laws and not them buying and converting a single copy.
Are they? Or are they just using it for training and not keeping the digital copy afterwards? And even if they are keeping a digital copy, does that actually matter if they never release it?
As for long term benefits, it could one day be sold as a service, once copyrights have expired on the works. We can't see it today, but that is purely the result of the law and what the law intended to do from the start, you don't see a copy unless you pay for your own.
Companies are paying for the books now, great! And destroying a book is really the best way to scan it. I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them. A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies nowadays.
Now what books exist in a single copy that destroying it would amount to losing knowledge? In any case, I would also expect such books to be very old, have very little useful content for training to start with, and be expensive enough to buy to make training on them unprofitable.
So what's the problem here exactly?
Also from the article:
> It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.
I'm all love for Anna's archive, but still, I find it rich that they now find themselves in position to make strong ethical claims.
If you've read the articles covering this issue, you'll be aware the concern is over the fate of rare and out of print books, rather than your straw man (ie those available in 'thousands to millions' of copies).
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o
> "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's.
> "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century.
> "It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."
Detestable if they're doing it anyway to prevent competitors getting hold of it.
There are multiple instances of a book being referred within another book, while at the time the author had access to it, we might not have it today. Taking a rare book and destroying absolutely erases that link we have with the past.
You not seeing a problem with this is the core issue, it's probably why the people doing it (it's people destroying these books not aliens) just shrug and don't feel too bad doing that.
Old books are even more crucial than today's books due to how uncommon it was to have something written/printed and bound. Many unique and single copy books explain to us a ton of things about the past, sometimes for funsies and sometimes for useful findings. Destroying old books is akin to destroying the closest we got to time machines.
It’s powerful symbolism. It reminds me of that tone-deaf iPad ad that sparked outrage in 2024. The one where all the cultural artifacts were crushed in an industrial press to make a soulless slab of glass. And that was Apple, who is generally well-liked by the public.
Of course you can. Nobody is saying these companies aren't allowed to do what they're doing.
But what they're doing is disgusting and something I can't forgive. It's an escalation of the attacks against society that these companies have been engaging in from the beginning. This isn't about legality, this is about what's right.
Isn't this just doing the work for the AI companies??? Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.
Google wanted to share the whole of Google Books 15 years ago, too, but they were sued to hell, so now you get a watered down search functionality.
Baloney. They aren't forced to destroy books. They could leave well enough alone and not scan them to begin with. They're voluntarily choosing to do this.
I'm not convinced they destroy the books to obey the law, lol.
This is such dangerous train of thought, to give them the benefit of being forced to destroy books. Why is that exactly, and who is forcing them? You can also, you know, find another way?
Like the data centers who currently use very dirty energy acquisition methods (not all of them), are they also "forced" to do this, because they too need to make as much money as the other ones? How long would you continue this idea of others "forcing" for-profit companies to try to make more money, regardless of consequences?
Destroying books used to be an obvious dumb, stupid and shit idea, not sure how somehow a for-profit company making of a digital copy for themselves of the book before destroying it, suddenly makes it not a shit idea for the rest of humanity.
I don't blame the companies for either wanting digitised works, nor following the law. I blame the absurd court ruling, and I blame the publishers for not having digitised the old works themselves, in which case they could just sell e-books to the labs... They are after all the only ones who can legally do it non-destructively.
A. Company destroys a book forever for training. Its scan is locked away forever in company records. In this case:
- This information is locked away in the improvisations of an LLM. It is no longer possible to directly access the information as written by the human being that authored it. This constitutes the loss of literary history, or at least loss of access to that history to the general public.
- The price of the book is no longer distinct from the general price of "inference". It becomes increasingly impossible to pay for specific information, instead you are charged by the meter for general machine inference, which doesn't even give you access to a specific text.
- The provenance of information is totally destroyed. This causes potentially unresolvable problems of authority and citation. If the original source is lost, how are we to know if a random LLM claim about an obscure topic or specific niche text is even true or just hallucinated?
B: Company uses freely available scanned copy of the text:
None of the issues above obtain, since anyone can still access the actual book. Most importantly, this reduces the power companies have to force everyone to continually pay for a derivative form of the book's information in perpetuity in the form of token costs.
I much prefer B.
Because these companies have no real strategy beyond trying to capture any and all information they possibly can to try and lock it away and charge the public for it in perpetuity.
What courts changed is failing to promote the progress of science and useful arts by destroying knowledge/art/books and access to those books, supposedly with the goal of maintaining market demand for those books. I mean this reasoning is so bad, so warped it could be used as James Bond villain humor.
Courts have failed to provide authors and inventors with exclusive rights, in fact they have destroyed a right authors effectively had. This decision goes against both the spirit and letter of the law, all because billionaires don't want to respect copyright anymore.
If you're going to do this, why have copyright at all? Can someone explain to me HOW you can explain that the constitution still supports this system?
But, of course, it gets worse. EU courts have decided the opposite, namely that without the author's permission you are not allowed to train an ML model on their texts. Ie. this becomes an additional right authors have, an additional thing authors can license (or not). Now that SOUNDS good, and you can bet the EU commission will be publishing about that. But it isn't good.
Of course the EU has demonstrated their usual do-nothing attitude. They have stated they are not going to do anything about people outside of the EU blatantly violating EU law, and let them profit inside the EU of violations of EU law, thereby destroying authors' income. As to the question why there is any need for EU law if you're not going to act on law violations ... no answer on that front.
To put it differently: why is chatgpt.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, ... not banned across the EU? Why are payments involving violating models allowed to go through, given that EU courts have sided with authors? What is the point of having EU laws at all?
But it's far worse: the EU commission is attempting to make their employees use a US model (chatGPT [2]), in violation of EU law, internally in their own organizations. Now from what I hear, they're failing at making people use it, WHILE paying US companies for illegal models.
I mean I hate what the US government has done, but the EU is far worse. They are officials, they are the institutions ... and their public claim to defend authors, their court judgements, their public stance ... is just an outright lie. I mean how else can you call this? 90% of the people involved here are lawyers, from the very top to the bottom rungs, all overwhelmingly lawyers. They know they are going against their own law, and doing it anyway. That is, at best, lying. The EU commission, even the courts and the EU's own bureaucracy will not follow the law internally, NOR are they making anyone else follow EU law!
The real effect of EU decisions: only Mistral, and other EU model providers are forbidden from, and punished for training on copyrighted data without permission. Everyone outside of the EU can just do it without permission and will not face any kind of consequences for that in the EU. EU companies (ie. hugging face) are hosting, for free, models in blatant violation of EU law.
Which is even worse than the US government stance in my opinion. EU has directly chosen for the worst possible of all combinations:
a) EU companies making ML models have to self-sabotage against their competition.
b) EU authors receive ZERO protection from the law. Not because the law doesn't support their case, but because the institutions whose only reason for existence is to enforce the law won't do their job. In fact THEY THEMSELVES violate EU authors rights.
Obviously, under these circumstances, AI model companies are going to outcompete musicians, authors, even movie studios. It's only a matter of time. And that is not a given, it is an explicit choice both the US and EU governments are making.
[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/f0b8d4c3-51aa...
[2] in their source you can see what models they were likely using internally 2 years ago: https://github.com/openeuropa/gpt-at-ec-php-client
Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity.
By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there are garbage. Most people clean their shelves with the books they don't care about, but preserve the ones that are good. If they are young people that inherited a house and don't care about books, they pick and sell the good ones, giving away the bad books.
If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more. That is, for every 100 books that are garbage there is one good quality book. It is very rare to find a jewel there.