AI Firms Are Buying Up Old Books, Then Scanning and Destroying Them

29 pointsposted 20 hours ago
by trhway
(novaramedia.com)

18 Comments

ReactiveJelly

17 hours ago

Glad the news broke. Now the market price for old books will shoot up

ompogUe

18 hours ago

Once again, see Rainbows End, by Vernor Vinge. Foresaw exactly this. Written in 2006, takes place in 2025.

PopAlongKid

16 hours ago

I just finished re-reading this a month ago. In the book, the process went a little further. The books were shredded into confetti-sized pieces first, then as the shreds were blown about in the air, many photos were taken, and then AI was used to stitch the fragmentary pieces of text together into the original pages.

tayo42

17 hours ago

I thought that title was misleading. They have to cut the book up to scan it. The way it reads makes it seem like they scan it then destroy it afterwards.

trhway

20 hours ago

"...Internal documents unsealed in legal filings in January revealed that Anthropic was acutely aware of how negatively such a project would be received outside the company.

“Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world,” an internal planning document said. “We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.” ..."

ronsor

19 hours ago

Don't like it? Change copyright.

They do this because the law required it.

jdiff

18 hours ago

They ignored the same copyright laws in many other cases. Why do we believe they were abiding strictly by it this time?

4gotunameagain

18 hours ago

What did the law require ?

And since when do AI companies care about copyright law ?

ceejayoz

18 hours ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine

> After the initial transfer of ownership of a legal copy of a copyrighted work, the first-sale doctrine eliminates the copyright holder's right to control ownership of that specific copy.

JohnFen

17 hours ago

How does the first sale doctrine require these horrific companies to destroy the books?

As near as I can tell, there is no legal pressure for them to do that. They're destroying them because that's how their scanning machinery works.

r-u-serious

17 hours ago

You know who also destroyed old books? The Nazis!

m4rtink

17 hours ago

Destroying books is a crime against humanity. Only bad people willingly destroy books.

FranzFerdiNaN

15 hours ago

Well guess I have committed many crimes against humanity because I’ve definitely dumped many cheap paperbacks I bought for holiday reading into the paper recycling container.

m4rtink

9 hours ago

Here in Europe there are actually anlot of "book corners" where you can just leave books you no longer need & pick up other books people left there.

They are in variois places - train stations, hospitals or even repurposed telephone booths.

Thats where such books belong IMHO - they can still be read by others like this.