Amazon cuts bindings off rare books for AI training, 404 Media finds
It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
A 404 Media investigation tracked a shipment of rare books to an Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas, where employees cut bindings off books to scan them for AI training data, destroying the books. Amazon employees at the VGT3 warehouse say they receive massive shipments of printed books and destroy them in the process. The bookseller who sold the tracked books said AI companies don't care about historical, intellectual, or sentimental value, only content as words.
There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There's historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about.
- areoform
I think this is impressive backwards reasoning.
Before my lifetime, copyright law all but choked and killed the public domain. And now everything is stale and the same.
This particular battle was lost with Google Books and the attempt to make the world's largest library. The modern library of Alexandria.
But then copyright lawyers got involved to get their pound of flesh. And here we are.
I am upset about the destruction of knowledge. Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago. I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them.
Everyone is impressively short sighted.
- Dylan16807
Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
- WalterGR
The 404 Media report referenced in the article was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742
“We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” (404media.co)
164 points | 3 days ago | 321 comments
- sonicrocketman
Original full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
- schoen
It's not necessarily doctrinally that crazy in copyright law. Some courts have considered AI training on copyrighted works a "transformative" use (traditionally more protected in fair use analysis), while providing human beings access to the works a "consumptive" use (traditionally less protected).
There's also a fair use consideration that favors noncommercial use compared to commercial use, but that's not the only question, and the statute doesn't say clearly how to combine the fair use factors.
But it's possible under the Copyright Act that some commercial uses of copyrighted works could be considered fair uses while some noncommercial uses could simultaneously not be considered fair uses.