They also love to publish stuff exclusively through Amazon so libraries won't get it.

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.

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.

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)

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

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."

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

"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.

Whistle-blown?

I wish there were any path for accountability anymore.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

Except when they are digitized and made publicly avaiable

They're destroying the books because it's cheaper than scanning them intact.

They're not acquiring actual knowledge, simply the most likely next word.

They would only need a single copy of each book. They aren't trying to get all possible copies to prevent others from getting them. They are trying to train their AI as quickly and cheaply as possible

Other AI companies can still buy them, they're just rare because nobody bought them in the first place. They destroy them because scanning them is faster and in some jurisdictions that absolves you from copyright infringement since the amount of copies doesn't go up

Rare does not mean good. I could write a novel, and it would be fucking atrocious. If I released 5 copies, it would be extremely rare, but it wouldn't be worth shit.

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'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.

That's what Lemmy is. Regurgitating the same story over and over again. For months.

Think of it like the difference between pulling your car's registration info and tracking your car across thousands of Flock cameras. At some point, scale is qualitatively different.

If you buy a house, it is illegal to set it on fire. It is also illegal to pump infinite molten lead into the soil under your house. It is also illegal to spray aerosolized asbestos out of the chimney of your house 24/7.

You still own the house.

• Buying food in order to destroy it is bad.

• Buying art in order to destroy it, also bad.

Ownership itself is a pragmatic social construct: you “own” things insofar as that “makes sense.”

Does it make sense for Amazon to own rare books? Not really. I’m not sure why that would be allowed. It’s like a child owning a rocket. It simply makes no sense in most contexts.

These books were purchased from booksellers. Booksellers don't typically carry books that won't sell. That's why it's unlikely these are somebody's fanfics printed on CreateSpace or something like that.

You're so smart and well informed, thanks for sharing those sources and details that provide that context. Awesome work!

Rare doesn’t automatically imply valuable

I agree, there is only one of you, and you're worthless.