FaceDeer

That’s what the copyright cartels want you to believe, sure.

It’s not the case. Rooting for it to become the case is repellent.

And so, exactly as I predicted, we’ve got commenters coming out to defend the poor innocent copyright cartels against those awful people pirating their stuff. Violating sacred EULAs, even, what monsters.

This isn’t a question of “walking it back”, though. There was never anything in copyright law that prohibited analyzing a copyrighted work before. This is an attempt to extend it.

A while back I saw a thread in a piracy community that was cheering some other lawsuit against an AI company for similar reasons, so I wouldn’t bet. The anti-AI sentiment is quite strong in these parts.

And now watch everyone cheer for Sony and Warner to succeed in their lawsuits to extend the grip of copyright. What a timeline.

It’s because these products work. They actually provide value to the users, despite opponents’ insistence to the contrary.

If they’re being used to “chase people down” I don’t think acceptance by the general public is all that relevant.

I download everything, I just may not ultimately keep it long-term if it turns out to be uninteresting or bad. Streaming and downloading transfer the same amount of bits, one just has higher demands for timeliness.

Never. There’s absolutely no need to use humanoid robots for that, other form factors would be much more efficient.

Choice is a good thing. Small communites are good. Decentralized is good because then big bullies can’t come in and take your community away. Small size and fragmentation are features, not bugs.

Would be nice if the Fediverse had more of that.

There are three or four different “Technology” communities. But there might as well just be one, it’s the same bubble in each of them.

In another comment regarding these books, you said:

They can keep both for all I care, tbh.

So it really seems you’re just insisting on this because you think it will make things harder for them. You don’t care about the books or who they go to in the end.

First people complained about them pirating, now people are complaining about them following copyright. It should be clear at this point that the people complaining don’t really care about either, they just don’t like AI.

But donate them to whom? The books were one step away from the pulpers when they bought them in the first place, who’s going to take them that values them more than that?

Also, these companies are not charities. What do they gain out of all that extra expense?

Well, who’s talking about buying?

How else do you think they got the books?

Here on social media we get to ensure that we only associate with other “normal” people. By our definition of “normal.”

And then we get shocked when we discover that large numbers of people out there are not, in fact, “normal.” Often when an election happens.

I can imagine a couple of reasons.

The most straightforward one actually is “capitalism”, but maybe if I explain it a bit you’ll accept it? :) I expect that the vast majority of the books that these companies are scanning are bought in bulk from wholesalers at the cheapest possible price, since the goal is quantity over quality. That means they’re probably buying the leftover books that the wholesalers are just one short step away from sending off to be recycled into pulp anyway. So re-binding them would mean they’re still left with nearly-worthless books that nobody else wanted to buy. It’s like those book sales libraries have from time to time, they put out the books that are scheduled for “disposal” in hopes that somebody will pick up a few before they go into the dumpster.

The other reason depends on the physical nature of the book. There’s lots of different book binding techniques and not all of them will leave you with something that’s easy to put back together. Lots of books are made up of smaller subunits of pages called “signatures”, typically 8, 16, or 32 pages, that get stitched together into the finished product. There are coil-bound books, comb-bound books, all sorts of things like that. A lot of them probably wouldn’t leave pages that are amenable to a one-size-fits-all rebinding. So that makes things a lot more costly, and again that’s a cost that produces a book that’s probably worthless for resale anyway.

Honestly I suspect that getting chopped and scanned is the best case scenario for most of the books in this situation. It converts them to digital form, rescuing their contents from being lost. The thing that bugs me is just how these companies squirrel away their hoards of books from the public. And the blame for that lies largely on copyright law, so I can’t blame them too much.

Is it one of those setups with a glass wedge the partly-open book is placed on with two digital cameras under it to photograph the pages? I’ve seen those contraptions, they’re neat and I’d love to have one for my personal library someday.

The thing the headlines keep skipping over in pursuit of outrage-clicks is that this is how you scan books in bulk. The spine is removed and the pages are fed through a high-speed scanner in sequence.

And the books that these companies are scanning this way are not “rare” in the sense of Gutenberg bibles or first-editions of famous works. These are books that have been sitting untouched in libraries or warehouses for decades because nobody wants them and their alternative fate is simply to be pulped and recycled. AI companies aren’t interested in quality, they’re interested in quantity. It would indeed be nice if they’d release the results of doing these scans to the public, of course, but that’s where copyright raises its head to ruin everything. They’re just following the law, unfortunately.

I’m all for getting more books scanned and uploaded to Anna’s Archive. But that’s a separate issue.

So, a ton more developers for the GrapheneOS ecosystem.

DRM is suddenly popular and people think it will work this time.