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I imagine the argument could go like this. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys all e

I imagine the argument could go like this. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge. Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?

like_any_other 1mo ago
In this hypothetical, my grandpa didn't patent this way to cure diabetes (otherwise the company would owe him royalties, assuming the patent hadn't expired). So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it. I'm sure people would prefer if Amazon also offered library-like access to the book, but how is it theft? I'm not asking about "any possible logic" - he called it theft.
- hattmall 1mo ago
  Words are subjective. The person is saying that it is theft and if the law doesn't define it as such then the law should change. The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.
  - sebastiennight 1mo ago
    > The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available. That is also my understanding of the claim, and I would intuitively agree with it.
  - lmz 1mo ago
    The physical copy was in private ownership before, otherwise how can they sell it to Amazon?
- voidhorse 1mo ago
  > So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it. Ok, but it's a bit different because they are not selling "the book" they are selling a fundamentally different thing for which the book is consumable input. Let's consider a batch of 5000 books. For kicks let's assume the known copies are N=1 for those books. Today, though only a few people can do this at a time, a person can purchase one of those books once read exactly the text in that book, and keep doing so to their heart's content. Or maybe a library buys it and now a rotating legion of people can do that for free. Now let's say amazon buys and scans them, destroying them in the process and refusing to release scans to avoid giving competitors a training edge. Now: - You can never get the information as written again. At best you'll get an LLM output approximation/mutation of it. If this was the expression of a real human beings lived experience, that's kind of sad and goes against one of the spirited aspects of human existence, to leave a legacy, doesn't it? - Amazon is going to charge you per token every time you want to access that information. - Price demand for the information is now tied up with general demand for LLMs rather than the actual book, either reducing or greatly inflating the cost to you in addition to the now recurring charges. So, now you (a) can't actually ever access that book as it was written (b) need to pay continually to access an approximation of its contents (c) and possibly more than the book is worth since now it's "value" in a price sense has been absorbed into general llm inference costs. Not to mention you may have eradicated the last extant copy of a person's memoirs, but I guess it's pretty clear people in this industry don't care at this point. I hope one day your entire life story is ground up and consumed in some data farming operation and you are all summarily forgotten.
ssl-3 1mo ago
Right. I understand this kind of analogy. They're intended to be analogous of reality. Which real-world company is said to be buying all existing copies of a book, here?
- sebastiennight 1mo ago
  IMHO it's an analogy because it's analogous, otherwise it would be reporting. This is why I would be just as stumped if you asked me for the specific real-world name of the granpa in the analogy. However, the recent headlines have been about "rare" books, of which it can therefore be assumed that few copies remain, and fewer of those (possibly none) would be accessible to the public if they are in the hands of collectors or long-time buyers. As an author, I know some of my own books didn't sell and probably exist by now in small enough quantities that if you destroyed the boxes in my apartment, and bought the last single copy still available used on Amazon, nobody's ever getting their hands on the other few that might be surviving in a couple of basements here and there.
  - ssl-3 1mo ago
    Destroying some rare books is destroying some rare books. That's a thing that appears may be happening; we can talk about that thing at face-value. No analogs required. Deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book is deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book. That's not a thing that appears to be happening; there's no face-value to talk about here, is there? Or are we just discussing left-field hypotheticals? Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :) As a voluminous writer myself, this is something that I do care about.
    - sebastiennight 1mo ago
      Alright then. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copies of the book, scans it, destroys the original, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Other copies still exist, but they're now marginally harder to find and the corporation gives no credit to the source in their product and marketing. Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge. Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"? > Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :) Sadly, I'm moving and a bunch of those books are going to get turned into pulp as I'm not going to keep lugging them around the world with me for the rest of my life. Where are the Archive guys when I need them?
rpdillon 1mo ago
> all existing copies of the book This is not happening. They want the text, nothing more. Depriving others isn't the goal, based on all empirical evidence about their behavior. It's about one each of every ISBN.

like_any_other 1mo ago

In this hypothetical, my grandpa didn't patent this way to cure diabetes (otherwise the company would owe him royalties, assuming the patent hadn't expired). So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it. I'm sure people would prefer if Amazon also offered library-like access to the book, but how is it theft? I'm not asking about "any possible logic" - he called it theft.

hattmall 1mo ago
Words are subjective. The person is saying that it is theft and if the law doesn't define it as such then the law should change. The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.
- sebastiennight 1mo ago
  > The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available. That is also my understanding of the claim, and I would intuitively agree with it.
- lmz 1mo ago
  The physical copy was in private ownership before, otherwise how can they sell it to Amazon?
voidhorse 1mo ago
> So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it. Ok, but it's a bit different because they are not selling "the book" they are selling a fundamentally different thing for which the book is consumable input. Let's consider a batch of 5000 books. For kicks let's assume the known copies are N=1 for those books. Today, though only a few people can do this at a time, a person can purchase one of those books once read exactly the text in that book, and keep doing so to their heart's content. Or maybe a library buys it and now a rotating legion of people can do that for free. Now let's say amazon buys and scans them, destroying them in the process and refusing to release scans to avoid giving competitors a training edge. Now: - You can never get the information as written again. At best you'll get an LLM output approximation/mutation of it. If this was the expression of a real human beings lived experience, that's kind of sad and goes against one of the spirited aspects of human existence, to leave a legacy, doesn't it? - Amazon is going to charge you per token every time you want to access that information. - Price demand for the information is now tied up with general demand for LLMs rather than the actual book, either reducing or greatly inflating the cost to you in addition to the now recurring charges. So, now you (a) can't actually ever access that book as it was written (b) need to pay continually to access an approximation of its contents (c) and possibly more than the book is worth since now it's "value" in a price sense has been absorbed into general llm inference costs. Not to mention you may have eradicated the last extant copy of a person's memoirs, but I guess it's pretty clear people in this industry don't care at this point. I hope one day your entire life story is ground up and consumed in some data farming operation and you are all summarily forgotten.

ssl-3 1mo ago

Right. I understand this kind of analogy. They're intended to be analogous of reality. Which real-world company is said to be buying all existing copies of a book, here?

sebastiennight 1mo ago
IMHO it's an analogy because it's analogous, otherwise it would be reporting. This is why I would be just as stumped if you asked me for the specific real-world name of the granpa in the analogy. However, the recent headlines have been about "rare" books, of which it can therefore be assumed that few copies remain, and fewer of those (possibly none) would be accessible to the public if they are in the hands of collectors or long-time buyers. As an author, I know some of my own books didn't sell and probably exist by now in small enough quantities that if you destroyed the boxes in my apartment, and bought the last single copy still available used on Amazon, nobody's ever getting their hands on the other few that might be surviving in a couple of basements here and there.
- ssl-3 1mo ago
  Destroying some rare books is destroying some rare books. That's a thing that appears may be happening; we can talk about that thing at face-value. No analogs required. Deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book is deliberately gathering up and destroying all copies of a rare book. That's not a thing that appears to be happening; there's no face-value to talk about here, is there? Or are we just discussing left-field hypotheticals? Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :) As a voluminous writer myself, this is something that I do care about.
  - sebastiennight 1mo ago
    Alright then. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys one of the rare few remaining copies of the book, scans it, destroys the original, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Other copies still exist, but they're now marginally harder to find and the corporation gives no credit to the source in their product and marketing. Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge. Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would consider Corporation A to be committing a form of "theft"? > Nobody is taking all of the unsold books out of your apartment to cut the spines off and scan the pages, are they? :) Sadly, I'm moving and a bunch of those books are going to get turned into pulp as I'm not going to keep lugging them around the world with me for the rest of my life. Where are the Archive guys when I need them?

rpdillon 1mo ago

> all existing copies of the book This is not happening. They want the text, nothing more. Depriving others isn't the goal, based on all empirical evidence about their behavior. It's about one each of every ISBN.