- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- fuck_ai@lemmy.world
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I’ve been boycotting Amazon since 2004. Waiting for everybody else to see it too. … See it yet??? Everybody???
I wish I had fewer opportunities to post this gif, I hate it
Why not just scan them carefully and use the pictures?
The answer to that question is obvious. They can do it 1000x faster cutting the spin and sending all the pages through a scanner. Otherwise you have to have something flip through every page and take a picture.
I figured. But sometimes the inconvenience should be part of it. I am fucking sorry. This is just disgusting…
Amazon, destroying books, this is such a full circle moment for them
They also love to publish stuff exclusively through Amazon so libraries won’t get it.
Can they at least provide all the scans to the public for free? It’s not like anyone is going to care if they violate copyright, that only applies to regular people.
That’s why they are scanning them and destroying them. Someone realized they can capitalize knowledge. We’re going to get the privilege of letting billionaires gate keep information and knowledge
Unfortunately, that would violate copyright law. In fact, the whole point of the destruction is to circumvent copyright, as apparently there was a ruling that scanning, tokenizing, and then destroying the original is transformative enough to be considered, “fair use.”
You think they give a fuck? These people are going to get to the point where they would take aim at random people with rifles and shoot them for fun and then act like they did nothing wrong.
Of course they would see an issue with that… If they are aiming themselves, it means they can be aimed at… So they will do it via drone.
You are definitely right. It just sucks that destroying books is “fair use” while using movie clips to make a parody video gets taken down with little recourse.
Friends don’t let friends use any form of Amazon they can choose to.
They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.
So what they’re saying is, we should start making as many legit-looking books full of bullshit and gibberish as possible, then send them to Nevada where they can be used to help “train” their AI.
Amazon wasn’t caught doing shit. “Caught” implies there is a possibility of consequences. Two days from now nobody is going to remember this story and the world will move on and there will be no consequences for this.
“caught” also implies they’ve been hiding it… It’s been out in the open how they scan books to train AI for a while now.
I don’t think most people realize that the most efficient process for scanning books involves disassembling them.
So of course they’re upset to hear the books are disposed of afterwards.
It has been almost a trope that every time the discussion of them buying up the used market and cutting them up to scan, some apologist comes along and says that these books are mass produced garbage and not rare.
Especially since the articles make it clear that the AI companies don’t care about rarity or quality. It’s just a dragnet to get as many books as possible. Sure, a lot of the books are going to be garbage, but some of them are going to be valuable, too.
The AI must be fed, and the only criterion is the book has to be published before 2022.
Whistle-blown?
I wish there were any path for accountability anymore.
More alarming was the upshot of that lawsuit: a judge ruled that because Anthropic was turning the physical texts into digital ones and destroying the original copies, it was “transformative” and therefore didn’t violate copyright law.
So by that token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid. Otherwise, having it ingested by an AI has no purpose it it’s not meant to be referenced in response to requests by the end user.
You are witnessing the last days of copyright of any form right now - mark my words!
That is probably the ultimate conclusion. Except there will be some bullshit exception for Disney and all the other mega media corporations.
No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.
SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people’s printed works.
Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it’s passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.
But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn’t apply to anything else. So you can’t use “physical medium” because books are a special case and have their own special US law.
For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Anthropic - I want to convert it to weights for use in massive matrix multiplication operations.
Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.
Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Google - I want to convert it to a searchable database of terms that can refer you to the correct ISBN.
And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it’s just under a different framework known as the DMCA.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to watch the movie.
That’s not transformative.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to take clips to make memes.
That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole “fair use” thing.
This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I’m not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren’t true.
And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren’t LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it’s impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.
The articles are oversimplifying because the law is impossibly complex, but the moral hazard is obvious.
It’s like they’re murdering orphans and someone tries to argue it’s actually state sanctioned manslaughter.
It’s not impossibly complex. You’ve just had it explained to you pretty well and succinctly.
No, it’s impossibly complex so lets scan and trash all the law books so AI can figure out how to legislate AI
You know it only needs one copy per book, right? And… then you can print another book
What’s the point of reading? Burn the rest of the confusing books and let our unreliable digital oracle tell us how it is.
books can’t be used to feed people, unlike dead orphans
Oh! Can I play? Let me transcode a video into a new format and put it on a blu-ray and then delete the old file! Transformative, lol.
Copyright law is not some philosophically derived right it’s literally just a government granted Monopoly that was invented in the 1700s because printers wanted dibs on books. It literally serves Now function other than giving advantages to our corporate overlords
token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid
only if you destroy the original i guess
(the real answer is that copyright is and always has been a tool for corporations to control the ownership of culture. what ai companies are doing isn’t fine in the eye of the state because it’s “transformative”, it’s fine in the eyes of the state because they’re corporations selling their products)
fucking book burners
It’s like if Fahrenheit 451 had the firefighters meticulously remove the spines and digitize the books before burning them. Amazon is buying a single copy of these books, and destroying the books to make it faster to digitize. Just not at all book burning.
You should be pissed about them using other peoples works to train their AI behemoth for profit. Not make a false equivalence to book burning…
that information is as good as gone if its in the hands of corporation while they destroy the original. also, you cant get the original info back from the training data, what they are doing is kind of like putting the information in a blender.
and since they destroy the original books, no one else can have them. They also destroy piece of history since physical book is immutable while digital information can be tampered with. With rare books its possible they are destroying the last copy of the book, no way to know for sure.
And i’m already beyond pissed that they use others work for profit. It has already been demonstrated that corporations are above any law, as long as they can manage their bribes and connections. You should trust corporations as much as you would a demon if demons were real.
https://lemmy.world/search?q=rare+books&type=Posts&listingType=All&page=1&sort=New&titleOnly=true
This has been posted to death. Does this really need ot be a weekly thread? There is nothing to discuss its bad and we hate AI and we hate amazon.
I’ve been on Lemmy since 2023 and I’ve never seen this article. Not everybody is chronically online. Please don’t listen to this guy.
Repost spam kills forum discussion. If you missed this post you can see it in the 10 other places it was posted yesterday.
That’s what Lemmy is. Regurgitating the same story over and over again. For months.
DAE communist manifesto, AI Bad, tanks good?
I stopped using Amazon like 8 years ago over various previous inhumane issues
Seems the rest of the world prefers slightly more convenience
What are you gonna do I guess
just remember. the planet is going to be just fine.
remember how quickly wildlife came back when covid shutdowns hit? it’ll be like that when the last human dies.
Great. The ants, cockroaches and rats will fight over world domination once we drove nearly everything else into extinction. That‘s so reassuring. I only ever cared about the ants anyway. /s
I genuinely don‘t give a shit about the 99% of the planet that isn‘t it‘s outer crust so obviously I don‘t care if „the planet will be fine“ either. That‘s not mine or your world. Neither is anything that happens in millions of years after pretty much every species we ever knew is no longer there. It‘s such a straw man argument. Nobody is talking about what that clown was talking about when saying „the planet“ and he knew it.
you’re thinking too small scale.
in 150 million years after humans who knows what kind of life will evolve.
Nobody knows and nobody cares. That‘s not our fight.
hence the attitude of, “the planet is fine, people are fucked”.
The last human will be descendant of billionaires who’s lineage lived underground for 8 generations
I ask people every now and then, the theme of the answer is similar: one stop shopping, it’s easier than looking elsewhere, answering with the question where else am I going to go? People tend to take the shortest path between A and B.
There are some things you can only find there, sure, but there’s more of a shopping dopamine hit if you look around. Other retailers do exist. Most of the time you can find it elsewhere.
I do most of my shopping through eBay, although some of the sellers use Amazon for fulfillment. They’re hard to avoid entirely.
This has been a serious bugbear for me lately. I switched to eBay, NewEgg, Etsy to spite Amazon’s monopoly on e-commerce but I have neither the awareness nor the “spoons” to sort out the vendors on those sites who ship through Amazon
It deflates my spirit a little every time one of my orders come in with that damn smirking logo
I miss electronics shops :( The chain and small hobby shops around me don’t carry things like resistors and capacitors. I checked every single one. Really.
Then I bought a lifetime supply of resistors, like actual hundreds, and it was delivered to my doorstep in under 6 hours for $8.
I dont miss paying extra just because its a local shop and they get to gouge
Just change one other mind. If everyone did the same they would be gone in no time. Do two and it will be done even sooner.
Name one “rare” book. Same articles never an evidence of what’s rare.
Exactly what is valuable?
Edit: love the downvotes, yet zero proof there is a rare book involved. We have had people look this up and post to Lemmy, no rare books found.
But hey facts dont matter right?
It a book one with an internal temperature less than 125⁰ F.
🤔 this actually seems like a good point. Like, I’ve seen videos of spines getting sliced off of old-looking books, and presented in the context of them being rare, but never actually fact-checked it myself. Now I’m wondering if I’ve been fooled. (I really hope so, in this case.)
I keep thinking there might be ones that are considered somewhat rare, but that is so relative. Its not like the real rare boom market isn’t there. I was looking at a couple books to buy that are considered rare, although they are public domain. They aren’t cheap maybe 2 to 3 hundred each, but I do have a choice of nearly 5 different printings to choose from, meaning if I buy one they dont go away entirely.
Also, who are the booksellers? Does this mean they can start pushing prices up for these purchases? Surely if AI companies are buying all the rare books they would begin to price them accordingly.
Also, for the rare books, are people trying to buy them to preserve them?
