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Discussion (33 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Yes, this is a result of copyright laws. The other commenters are wrong/uninformed.
If it was up to the companies training LLMs, they wouldn't destroy the books: It's a waste of company resources, it's needlessly destructive/evil, it generates bad PR, etc etc. There are essentially zero advantages, other than it is what is required under US copyright law (or at least, it is what their highly paid lawyers believe is required under US copyright law).
But ultimately, it's a moot point, because the legal requirement means the books must end up destroyed. Even if the people at Amazon wanted to scan the books in a way that required no destruction at all, it's not currently (legally) possible for them to do so, so they might as well take the easy way out today.
A judge a while ago decided that as long as the physical copy is destroyed, and "transformed" into an electronic copy, you can do the upload. But if you preserve the physical copy after scanning it, you are in violation of copyright because you "copied" the book.
That's literally the only reason they are trashing them. It's a legal requirement.
and previously:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
Although, we have to face the fact that the 'indie' book industry isn't necessarily preserving stuff either. I was recently in an old fashioned book shop in Charing Cross road, and they were selling old pictures as well as books. I was going to buy one as a present until I realised that they were pages that had been cut out of some book, because they could get more selling them separately.
I think in the situation where the background rate is 640,000 tons of books being destroyed per year, the burden of proof is on the one making the claim that Amazon is destroying rare books, and doing so at a higher rate than they're being destroyed already.
This is the legal loophole that allows them to do what they need to do, and the benefit of doing it outweighs the modicum of outrage this title will generate.
Edit. Because I see my statement confused all the HN experts:
Anthropic's version of this was Project Panama [1]. The destruction of the original allows them to keep a digital copy in the AI training dataset. Quoting from the page:
> Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction and digitization of legally purchased books constituted fair use
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama
It sounds shocking if you're missing the context and didn't go past the blogspam which is this TechCrunch article.
They aren't buying the books only to destroy them but to build an AI training dataset, which means they're making a digital copy. This becomes a copyright issue. The destruction is the legal loophole that allows them to keep the digital copy as the only copy in circulation and be considered fair use as decided by a judge (see below).
The concept of ownership means you can do anything you want with the object, the book in this case. Not with the content, like make or distribute copies. The scanning machines are cutting the spine of the book, feeding the pages to scanners, and then destroying the physical copy.
Anthropic's version of this was Project Panama [1]. Quoting from the page:
> Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction and digitization of legally purchased books constituted fair use
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama
"They're allowed to be a hypocrite" doesn't mean they aren't a hypocrite.