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Ask HN: How is AI destruction of books legal?

1 points by Madmallard ↗ HN
I'm talking about Anthropic and other AI companies finding rare books, feeding their pages into the model training data, and then shredding the books afterward.

They are destroying history actively. It reminds me of religious people claiming these people really are the four horsemen of the apocalypse. Surely this should be treated very harshly and stopped??? I don't want novels to disappear, especially rare ones?

10 comments

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deadeye
Its private property. I don't like it either, but I wouldn't like intrusive laws either.
Madmallard
private property is a nonsense concept if state level wealth allows someone to buy everything
RALaBarge
Did they purchase the books legally? Is their plan to destroy every copy of every book ever, and if it were, would that even be possible?
JohnFen
I can destroy anything that I own. So can they. They're despicable for doing this, but there's nothing remotely illegal about it.

Not everything bad should be illegal, because sometimes outlawing a thing can have greater adverse consequences than the thing itself. Some things are better handled through social rejection.

Madmallard
nonsense when they can spend billions of dollars

are u even thinking through what you're saying?

oh hey we can buy up all housing in these cities and then just destroy it and make it uninhabitable

what a joke

in no universe should that be allowed

toomuchtodo
There is no law about destructively scanning your own books. If you would like to preserve a book, buy it and send it to the Internet Archive for non destructive scanning and long term physical archival. It's very easy to do so, as someone who sends them books.

https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

https://help.archive.org/help/does-the-internet-archive-have...

battery_staple_
The way the laws are written, you have the right to digitize books that you own physical copies of. If your physical copy is destroyed, you retain ownership of the digital copy. But the moment you transfer ownership of the physical copy to someone else, you no longer have the right to your digital copy.

You're asking how it's legal for them to remove books from circulation, when that's the only way under the current laws for them to obtain permanent digital copies, legally.

Madmallard
Yes, and that law breaks down when it's an entity with billions of dollars that can acquire millions of books. That no longer is reasonable. Now it's destruction of historical significance.