You have probably seen this article and people being unbelievably mad about it:
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
but, like, I have a lot of problems with this panic. The process of digitization does necessarily involve destroying the book, or at least, if you want to go fast. The fastest way to scan books is to remove the pages from the spine and having them go through the scanner. If the book was getting digitized at a mass level, it was getting destroyed one way or another. Now, I could agree that this should be made available on a public pdf repository, but if any other organization undertook the same amount of digitization, you can bet that the books are not making it out of the process, either.
Also, like, this sort of shit pisses me off so much as a (former) librarian:
One small book seller said that in April, he suddenly went from selling no more than 20 books a week to hundreds, and he’s almost certain that the customers are AI labs, noting the random selection of the books and how they all have ISBNs. He added that his inventory is full with rare and out of print books, meaning that an AI company could be destroying some of the few remaining copies that can be found.
like, these people were 1) not seeing the books circulate via sale or 2) making the effort to make the content be available to the public. From the point of view of the general public, you were not getting access to the book either way. These companies are not ripping books off the shelves of public libraries to do this; they are buying books that were not circulating, and they are, as of this reporting, not competing with preservation groups that are trying to digitize the books. This is just blatantly stroking panic when the person that's being interviewed and stroking the panic was also not doing anything about the problem at hand. Why should this be considered a loss, when this small business tyrant is also not diong anything for the public?
On top of that, the article says:
This process took advantage of a legal concept known as first-sale doctrine, which allows a buyer to do what they want with a purchase without the original copyright holder’s say-so.
Like, are we suddenly against first-sale doctrine? Do they know how hard it will be libaries to operate without it? I am just going to take ALA's website's block quote on this matter here:
The “first sale” doctrine (17 U.S.C. § 109(a)) gives the owners of copyrighted works the rights to sell, lend, or share their copies without having to obtain permission or pay fees. The copy becomes like any piece of physical property; you’ve purchased it, you own it. You cannot make copies and sell them—the copyright owner retains those rights. But the physical book is yours. First sale has long been important for libraries, as it allows them to lend books without legal hurdles. (Jenkins, Jennifer. 2014. "Last Sale? Libraries’ Rights In The Digital Age". College & Research Libraries News 75 (2): 69-75.)
In other words, as ALA says, "first sale is what allows libraries to do what we do – lend books and materials to our patrons, the public." The way that futurism goes after first sales as an underlying cause for this "evil" phenomenon while elevating the voices of small business owners that had no problem keeping the rare books out of the public in the first place shows that this is not out of legitimate concern for the future of public access of/dissemination of past information, but for getting people riled up in cheap moral panic.
I do have legitimate concern about the usage of man hours and construction contracts on stuff that might never pan out (and thus artificially inflating the perception of level of activity that's happening in the economy), but doing this without understanding the process invovled blunts all the legitimate criticisms.
not to give green day credit but it is immensely funny how often Big Corporation For Guys Men Guys Guy Corporation will be like hi green day play my event. and green day is like ok Big Corporation For Guys Men Guys Guy Corporation but you know we suck dick and penis and want to kill politicians and we are going to play our song we suck dick and penis and want to kill politicians .and Big Corporation For Guys Men Guys Guy Corporation is like ok green day thats cool. and then green day plays their song we suck dick and penis and want to kill politicians. and Big Corporation For Guys Men Guys Guy Corporation is like wtf green day you cant do that you cant play your song we suck dick and penis and want to kill politicians. and this has been happening in a cycle for 30 years.
reminds me of the time Rage Against the Machine were vying for Christmas Number 1 (british public was doing a little trolling) so the BBC had to let them come on and play 'Killing In the Name Of' live on the breakfast show, and they asked them not to swear and they swore
see the thing about the turn to properly pointing conan as an influence to the sword-and-sorcery genre is, by then going further and saying that it's only conan that serves as the major influence, you are diminishing a different discussion. for one, sword-and-sorcery pulp fiction did influence current landscape of fantasy genre fiction as much as "elevated" genre, but folding it all into "fantasy" ignores the difference in production and intended audience from the producers. even getting into the content, the depcition of a lot of non-human races as caricaturized versions of racialized people in fantasy does come from tolkein, as much as how the protagonist interacts with the world and the assumptions being made is informed by robert e howard's writing.
also, there are many other sword-and-sorcery authors that aren't even getting mentioned. for instance, the influential status is also true of michael moorcock's cosmology of chaos and law being influential with not just sword and sorcery (and planet) pulp fiction, but tabletop RPGs, and a number of video game RPGs, as well. the idea of aliens as essentially just another variant of human (or very similar) race, on full display in edgar rice burroughs' influential john carter series, unmistakeably has the scent of tarzan, another, more famous series he's written, seeping into how the exotic Other is written even when they're human in a lot of the subsequent works in the genre. this is just as true for john norman's gor cycle and the passively-malevolent misogyny that masquerades as benevolence that acts as a counterweight to the more aggressive misogyny that does not even have this masquerade that is often on display when one reads howard's conan.
tumblr users love learning 1 new fact and immediately running to negate the last thing they learned, but the racist landscape of sword-and-sorcery (in tandem to sword-and-planet, another genre influential to the much of the current genre fantasy fiction) is not just one author; it is a product of a profoundly racist and misogynistic society of the early-to-mid 20th century (a lot of whose baggaes has not been properly confronted in the 21st century, either), and it seeps into every other influence for the genre. nor does the influence of the pulp subgenre negate the influence of the more literary version of the said genre. it's important to understand which aspect came from who, and who those influences, in turn, also were in conversation with. robert e howard, as well as fritz leiber (another racist author of the gray mouser cycle) were, while not as influential for the genre in discussion, deeply and intensely in conversation with HP Lovecraft (another person whose writing people discard as an influence), after all, as well!
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