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As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna’s Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.
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I have access to a book scanner, but I’m not sure what books need to be scanned, are legal to be scanned and uploaded (I don’t want to get expelled for using a school scanner to do something illegal), or whether there is personally identifiable data in the PDFs it generates (I think I can also save in GIF and maybe PNG?). Is there a beginner’s guide anywhere for all this?
Anna’s Archive does have guides for all of that (apart from the legal advice) on their site (use wikipedia to find the right domain).
I don’t think you’d want to do so as a university student unless you want to share the same fate as Aaron Swartz though.
Surely at least the stuff out of copyright is kosher to scan and share? Which seems like a good area to focus on if they’re being bought up and destroyed
Stuff that’s out of copyright isn’t an issue though.
The reason AI companies are destroying books is because current US copyright caselaw (most recently the Anthropic lawsuit) doesn’t allow books to be copied, but considers it fair use if you transform the format of a legally purchased book (like from print to digital) without creating a new copy. By destroying the original book, they haven’t made a copy of it, and so they operate within US law.
This doesn’t apply to public domain books (books that are no longer copyrighted) as you can do whatever you want with public domain content.
Anna’s is the real deal
This feels like a “moment where good people took action in history books”.
The problem is there is not enough good people left in the world. Most are, if not evil, at least unwilling to take action
Or the evil ones have too much power
This, the many good people are left powerless, defeated, believing that the only way to “succeed” is to be evil and that there is no hope left. That’s how those in power want it. The people who threaten their power to feel resigned and hopeless.
its not that theres a lack of good people, its just difficult to get into positions of power and remain good.
There are far more good people than evil people. Its just that the evil people are loud as fuck so they draw your attention more than good people.
There is a glaringly obvious issue with this article that I see a lot of people in the comments seem to have missed:
Only one copy of any given book exists The pretense to this entire thing is that AI companies are destroying the books both because of the process used AND to prevent competitors from accessing the book. There is more than ONE copy of that book. If you buy a book, that doesn’t prevent me from also buying that book. You can not like AI for a number of reasons, but this is just stupid.
NOTE: If destroying the book actually prevented competitors from accessing it, that means that all of these AI companies are only going out on the weekends to used bookstores looking for good deals on second hand books.
There are plenty of books out there that don’t have many copies.
If you can purchase a book at a bookstore, then it can be assumed there are sufficient copies in production. They aren’t buying rare books here.
They aren’t buying rare books here.
That’s exactly what I’ve heard they’re doing.
So there have been a bunch of articles about this lately. They play loose with descriptions in their titles. Here is one example: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books
“Antique books”. One, notice they don’t mention any actual title or ISBN? Two, these are bought through a book reseller (like Book Depot or ThriftBooks), meaning that “antique” just means “used”.
In my personal library collection I have new books, I have used books, and I have rare books. These are not the same thing.
