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Amazon Caught Destroying Rare Books to Train AI (futurism.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] [S] 22 points 2 months ago* (6 children)

Just because it's legal, that doesn't make it right. Corporations do terrible things all of the time which are perfectly legal.

If I was the owner of the only copy of an important book, I would have the legal right to destroy it, but nobody could argue convincingly that I did a good thing.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    If I was the owner of the only copy of an important book, I would have the legal right to destroy it, but nobody could argue convincingly that I did a good thing.

    I'd argue that, if the destruction was done to digitize the book, what you did was a good thing. Would you disagree?

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  • [–] 6 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    There's a huge difference, an absolute chasm, between non-destructive scanning, which was always an option by the way, for the purposes of putting it in a public archive and And destructive scanning with the intent to hide it from the public where it may never surface for all we know.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    There’s a huge difference, an absolute chasm, between non-destructive scanning, which was always an option by the way, for the purposes of putting it in a public archive

    Like Anna's Archive, or Sci-Hub. Famously legal.

    If only they uploaded everything to those archives, the scanning would be perfectly fiiiiine.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    First, I was discussing the hypothetical put forth by that other person.

    Second, "hide it from the public" is almost certainly a function of copyright law. Just because you are allowed to digitize a book doesn't mean you're allowed to distribute it.

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