genAI companies are now buying up rare and antique books so they can scan them and use them to train their AI. then they're destroying the books afterward.
AI companies are quietly obtaining rare books, ingesting their contents, and then destroying them -- even if they're exceedingly rare.
they've had to face settlements against stealing from current authors, so they'll just go for the old books now. they're also doing this so they have the only copies of rare books.
they're taking water, power, natural resources for their data centers. they steal. they're book burning, essentially. i'm just so angry, i'm at a loss right now.
There will be people who think that the books are being "preserved" or that many of these books are not valuable enough to care about, or too old. But if these books had no value, genAI companies wouldn't want to take them, copy them, then charge people for the copies.
I read somewhere that the Library of Alexandria wasn't just lost to a single devastating fire, but went through many stages of neglect before anyone mourned it's loss.
I don't want the future generations to mourn what we might lose to these companies.
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. And since Anthropic was turning the original physical texts into digital ones — rather than redistributing them as new copies — a judge found this to be “transformative,” and therefore protected by fair use.
how training AI models on books is fair use when the models are used to produce texts that directly compete with those books is beyond me
