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The Vanishing Page: AI Firms Scan Then Destroy Rare Book Editions
- inigyou 2mo agoYes, 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.
- lookingdesk 2mo agoThat's not how copyright works, at all.
- inigyou 2mo agoYes, actually it is
- netsharc 2mo agoI'm going to buy a Taylor Swift CD, rip it as MP3s, destroy the CD, and put the MP3s online... Will I get sued?
- pfdietz 2mo agoThe "putting it online" part is where you are f-ing up.
- themaninthedark 2mo agoBut 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...
- pfdietz 2mo agoIt 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.
- pfdietz 2mo agoDestroying your copy of a copyrighted work does not violate copyright.
- inigyou 2mo agoFormat shifting is allowed. Making copies isn't. By destroying the original, it's format shifting.
- pfdietz 2mo agoRight. 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.
- madaxe_again 2mo agoIt 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.
- themaninthedark 2mo agoSo what are they doing about the online data they ingested?
- ninkendo 2mo agoCopying 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”
- inigyou 2mo agoI 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?
- ninkendo 2mo agoThey got sued for violating copyright in general, not for “not destroying books” in particular. Destroying the books was a legal trick they used to continue scanning them without breaking the law. If I were running the AI company and my lawyers came back with “teeeechnically we can still scan them if we burn them after”, I would reply with “I guess we’re not scanning them”, but I lack the sociopathic instincts required to be a tech CEO I guess.
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- callmeal 2mo agoYay 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?
- madaxe_again 2mo agoYou could “ingest” them all into a “model” and sell access to the information within them via “token usage”
- jstummbillig 2mo agoForever preserving the content of a rare book by consuming one (1) copy is the kind of thing we should always be doing more of. Roughly nobody would have had access to that copy. Roughly everyone can now benefit from its content.
- maccard 2mo agoWhere can I read any of these destroyed copies from anthropic?
- XorNot 2mo agoWhat 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.
- Certhas 2mo agoRoughly Anthropic owners benefit from the content, unless the scans are made available somehow.
- anon373839 2mo ago> 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.
- polarbearballs 2mo agoI 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.
- 28304283409234 2mo agoOne (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.
- polarbearballs 2mo agoWho knew Ray Bradbury could be so wrong.
- pfdietz 2mo agoNowhere are the supposed rare books listed. Confuses "(not all that) old books" with "rare books". Ragebait, nothing more.
- madaxe_again 2mo agoThey 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.
- pfdietz 2mo agoI'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."
- eleventen 2mo agoThere is good discussion on the previous thread from 6 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
- tacticalturtle 2mo agoIt’s been stunning how often this story is reposted from various news sources across Reddit and Hacker News. Each time it’s some different outlet - but when you dig in, the piece is just verbal framing around the original story written by 404 media: https://archive.is/9MQrK https://archive.is/9MQrK What’s even more stunning is that the original article doesn’t provide evidence that “rare” books are being destroyed. That doesn’t even appear in the original article title.
- cowanon77 2mo agoOn 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.
- storus 2mo agoAs 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.
- jmyeet 2mo agoYeah, 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.
- datakan 2mo agoEntropy 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.
- DrDeese 2mo agoWhy don't they just put the pdf versions on Internet Archives? Then they would at least be preserved for the future
- pfdietz 2mo agoThat would be illegal.
- darkoob12 2mo agoWhy don't they rebind them and put it back in some library? They don't have to throw it out.
- XorNot 2mo agoBecause 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.
- quacked 2mo agoHumanity 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.
- datakan 2mo ago10 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.
- robrain 2mo agoIt'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.
- themaninthedark 2mo agoRelated: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127284 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127284
- skybrian 2mo agoIt’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.
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- docheinestages 2mo agoThey should at least give the scanned copies to a non-profit or government entity to preserve and release them when the copyright expires.
- yallpendantools 2mo agoI'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-firms-destroying-obscure-editions-train-ai-models 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.
- shrubble 2mo agoThere 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9LcTZU-HHI
- 64e23275635e 2mo agoIt should be more than obvious, that the problem are not the scanners.
- IshKebab 2mo agoNot all books are sacrosanct. There doesn't seem to be any evidence that they are destroying rare and valuable books.
- NishanStepak 2mo agoWhen 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.