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At least there will be a copy left for us. The AI companies won't share these books in their original form.
by torh 1mo ago
At least there will be a copy left for us. The AI companies won't share these books in their original form.
- brainwad 1mo agoBecause it's illegal. That's the whole reason they are shredding books in the first place, because copyright law forces them to do stupid things. 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.
- xandrius 1mo agoGoogle probably wanted to sell the whole of Google Books.
- naasking 1mo agoYes, government regulations are almost always behind commercial entities making seemingly irrational choices.
- Paratoner 1mo agoThe poow AI execs being forced to commit acts of intewwectual tewwowist when all they wanted was to cynicawwy make the wowld a wowse place
- embedding-shape 1mo ago> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things 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.
- brainwad 1mo agoIt is a shit idea. But that's copyright law for you - if you want to digitise the work for yourself, you according to latest precedents have to destroy the copy you digitised ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯ 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.
- embedding-shape 1mo agoBut why do they have to do this at all? If it's a shit idea, and you cannot do something without negative side-effects of it, can't you just not do it? Why these companies absolutely have to do this?
- famouswaffles 1mo agoWhat's shit about it ? They're buying books that would be headed for the pump or trash heap anyway. Millions of books are trashed or pulped every day.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- brainwad 1mo agoWell, they want to use the book they own in digital format. They own it, they get to decide what to do with it.
- JohnFen 1mo ago> because copyright law forces them to do stupid things. 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.
- brainwad 1mo agoLet us not forget they own the books. They bought them legally on the open market. Also, no modern book truly is destroyed forever, there are always libraries of record with a copy.
- JohnFen 1mo ago> Let us not forget they own the books. That's rather beside the point. I don't think anyone is arguing that what they're doing is in some way illegal. > no modern book I'm less concerned about modern books.
- brainwad 1mo agoAll the books being destroyed are modern enough to have deposited copies, or they wouldn't be still under copyright. The destruction is happening to satisfy judges that no illegal copying is happening, only a transformation of medium.
- JohnFen 1mo agoAll the reports I hear is that they're doing this with all books, not just ones still under copyright.
- subscribed 1mo agoCopyright law didn't force them to torrent terabytes of books what they did and got caught doing so. I'm not convinced they destroy the books to obey the law, lol.