The world’s biggest AI companies are buying antiquarian books en masse so they can be scanned to train their large language models (LLMs) before being destroyed.
Destruction of books should not be a legal requirement, books scanned without destruction could go to a public library without violating laws.
Yeah, I wish this was the case. I don’t think that under Anthropic’s prior ruling at least, that it would be allowed though, since after donating to the library (assuming they non-destructively scanned the books) they would then have to discard the entire set of digital copies they made, as that would mean they copied the work, and thus didn’t engage in a legal “transformation” of that work that maintains only one copy, and thus there would be no reason for them to do it in the first place.
I wish our copyright law could at least consider a donation to a library as equivalent to destruction of a work so companies could keep a scan but not have it be considered a copy. That way at least we’d be getting the giant influx of books going to libraries from AI training bs.
Yeah, I wish this was the case. I don’t think that under Anthropic’s prior ruling at least, that it would be allowed though, since after donating to the library (assuming they non-destructively scanned the books) they would then have to discard the entire set of digital copies they made, as that would mean they copied the work, and thus didn’t engage in a legal “transformation” of that work that maintains only one copy, and thus there would be no reason for them to do it in the first place.
I wish our copyright law could at least consider a donation to a library as equivalent to destruction of a work so companies could keep a scan but not have it be considered a copy. That way at least we’d be getting the giant influx of books going to libraries from AI training bs.