Amazon Caught Destroying Rare Books to Train AI
2 days ago by zarkanian to c/technology
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
books can't be used to feed people, unlike dead orphans
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)
You are witnessing the last days of copyright of any form right now - mark my words!
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.
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.
They also love to publish stuff exclusively through Amazon so libraries won't get it.
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.
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.
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.
Amazon never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
I'm just repeating what 404 media said on their July 21 podcast. They said that the first reports of AI book buyups were in Spain and the Netherlands, from rare book traders. The theory is that these AI companies are in a race to get the rare books first because they will be scanned and destroyed and they know that the widely circulated books will be available later
Edit: and if you scan and destroy rare books then you have an advantage over the competition, another company can't scan a book you've destroyed
Friends don’t let friends use any form of Amazon they can choose to.
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.
DAE communist manifesto, AI Bad, tanks good?
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.
Where I draw the line for whether it is ethical to light things on fire is when they start destroying rare knowledge and books as fast as possible for no other reason than to hoard and obscure knowledge for private benefit.
It is one thing to fund the creation of knowledge and then hoard it, it is entirely another to begin actively attacking and destroying pre-existing publicly shared resources of knowledge in the pursuit of monetizing access to that very knowledge behind a gargantuan profit motivated entity.
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
The most ironic thing is that this is the only way that the current cultural metastasis appreciates rare knowledge. Which we once did!
Like music it is the most fundamentally human endeavor and it has been destructively gamified. Thank fucking god for libraries, support yours!!!!!
I wish I had fewer opportunities to post this gif, I hate it
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.
there’s this idea in the AI development zeitgeist that “rare data” is the only advantage left. this stuff is almost certainly motivated by that type of thinking. if they can have data in their datasets that no one else does, they view that as the only way left to be ahead of the competition.
i mean, i’m not arguing for this position necessarily. i agree with you.
that said, in practice, the “bad data” comes out in the wash. for example, all of Reddit is likely in their datasets. who knows what their data cleaning process is like, but diversity in the data is generally a good thing from a training perspective.
So Amazon should be destroyed to train humans?
Nothing good ever came of destroying books.
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...
This is a weird one. If I buy a book, rare or not, do I not own it?
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.
Are you suggesting we have food and art police? Would a government body decide what I am allowed or not allowed to do with my wagyu steak? Having freedoms sometimes mean we have to accept the actions of others we disagree with.
Did I make any policy suggestions? These are simply moral facts. Laws are a matter of convenience, and if it’s inconvenient for us to legally constrain some evil behaviors, oh well.
What do you think is the appropriate action to this? When you start to establish laws based on evil behaviour, you eventually get witch trials.
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.
If I buy a book, it is not illegal to destroy it. Your analogy doesn't work. You are talking about acts that could affect the health and well being of others.
Rare doesn’t automatically imply valuable, useful or anything like that.
My Anthony Fauci x Drowsy Don fanfic is “rare”, but nobody including me would bat an eye if it was destroyed.
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.
Booksellers “carry” utter shit.
Guess what they do when the book is refunded by the publisher due to bad sales? They cut off the covers and send them back as proof. The pages are destroyed. Nobody bats an eye.
No publisher or bookseller wants to carry 50000 copies of Joe Bob’s “How to cook maggots” when it flopped
Also how do you know if my fanfic is a physical book sold at a store or not? 😀
Also how do you know if my fanfic is a physical book sold at a store or not? 😀
Because you're a loggerhead shrike, and you don't look anything like E. L. James.
Rare doesn’t automatically imply valuable
I agree, there is only one of you, and you're worthless.
what media ? I can't find it ?
Obviously this isn't ideal, and fuck the massive amounts of destruction (environmental, economical, societal) of AI, but these stories amount to 'book owner does what they want with books they own'.
I don't disagree with any of these responses, and I'm not saying reporting on this to make people aware of it is bad or pointless.
So now what do we do about it?
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Except they own those books only because they locked out regular people who want them and used insane amounts of capital they've stolen from said people to buy everything up.
This isn't a guy deciding to toss his copy of a book. This is a company who has destroyed industries and the environment and used basically slave labor forcing people to pee in bottles to meet insane requirements all to hoard wealth that they used to hoard more things.
Condensing it to"book owner does what they want with books they own" ignores so many historic and systemic problems that led to this.
This is one of those "Legally nothing is wrong, but morally and ethically it definitely is". Still a case where I throw even more massive shade on these companies for doing it. They could have just been donated to a library, there was no need to destroy them.
When a person purchases something, it's that person's personal property. When a corporation purchases something, it's that capitalist's private property.
A true analysis of this type of headline would be more along the lines of "capitalist uses capitalism to encircle and entrench their capital at the expense of human culture and society"
Yeah, you know that episode where Homer does pranks for Mr Burns and goes in and buys a no 1 spiderman from the comic book guy and eats it in front of him. That's how most people feel about book destruction. Nothing legally wrong, but disgusting nonetheless.
You could take those downvotes as an invitation to check if those other stories (environmental, economical, societal) hold up any better.
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?
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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.
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