[ACCount37]

The publishers sued AI companies for training on shadow library data, hoping to negotiate content deals for big $$$ down the line. Instead, they got analog hole'd.

Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25 is way cheaper than paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers.

What I don't buy is it being "rare, precious books". First, they're not after ancient texts - they're after the books that there's still copyright on. Second, when it comes to books, "old" doesn't mean "valuable" - plenty of libraries destroy old books because there's no demand for them, and storage costs you. This is how those scanning companies get books for so cheap.

[tencentshill]

So they're not valuable... except to AI companies. They should pay a fair amount.

[ACCount37]

They are paying a fair amount. In the ballpark of $5 per book.

You know, piracy online is nice and simple - but it's kind of hard to get physical media without paying what the previous owner considers "a fair amount" to part with it.

[chii]

> They should pay a fair amount.

they should pay the marginal value that the next buyer would buy.

Do you also think that a person dying of thirst ought to pay the maximum price they could possibly pay for water?

[qwytw]

> the marginal value that the next buyer would buy

Well the argument is that they should pay for the right to produce derivative works not for the physical copy.

[Kim_Bruning]

Sure, but they're not producing derivative works.

I'm told some of the recent Qwen models were trained on something like 140TB of data or so. I can put some of the Qwen models on a slightly large USB stick (~32G) . No way that contains the whole source text. No form of compression survives that. It's an old argument, it's still the simplest argument-by-numbers.

The intuition this counters is "it's drawing from a big database" or "it memorized everything". It didn't. It still can recall passages at times. But then again, so can I for my favorite books and movies.

And no I'm not saying it's human, to stop the next big jump.

LLMs are LLMs. They have their own properties. Some of which happen to coincide with human properties. Just like a robot arm has some properties in common with humans.

Similar requirements, similar constraints; you're going to have to expect similar behaviors and failure modes at least some of the time. But I haven't heard anyone claim a robot arm can edit a python program, nor have I heard of an LLM picking 100 widgets per minute.

[TeMPOraL]

Given the specific of the "derived works" being produced, do you feel obliged to pay royalties every time you cite or use some knowledge acquired from a book during your daily life?

[qwytw]

Well no, but I'm a human and not a commercial computer program so it's not particularly relevant. I'm would not be making loads of money making those citations either but that's only secondary.

> derived works

It's not evident that any works are being produced in the legal sense. Since LLM outputs are not considered copyrightable it's probably closer to using a search engine.

[soco]

It might be me but I fail to see the equivalence of AI companies with thirst deaths. That', or maybe because it's a strawman.

[Minor49er]

The point is that you can buy a book for a few bucks, read it, and have its insights completely available to you. But people are demanding that LLM companies pay far more to publishers for the same copies

[qwytw]

You can also buy a book produce a large number of copies after jumbling around some chapters sell it to other people. That's illegal to do if you are person but not if you an AI company.

I suppose an argument might be made for fair use if they released their model weights publicly without financially profiting from it.

[bitwize]

If Elon Musk is dying of thirst then the price of that glass of water is set at (pinky to side of mouth) one million dollars.

[TeMPOraL]

Doing that would be considered deeply immoral and sociopathic in any sane culture. Do you really want to live in a society that finds such attitudes acceptable?

Instead of blindly jumping on a manipulated outrage bandwagon, people would do well to maybe read some of those old books, not even the rare ones - they tend to contain plenty of parables and stories explaining basics of morality and civilized conduct. We used to teach that to kids at homes and in primary education...

[abustamam]

I've seen many people sell products and courses with price parity, meaning someone in the US pays one price and someone in South Africa pays less.

Me, as a software engineer, will do research on a company to determine how much they can afford to pay me before giving them my salary range.

And almost every SAAS company charges people differently depending on their needs, even if the underlying software is identical between customers.

So no, I don't think it's inherently immoral to charge different prices to people depending on their ability to pay or use cases. It can be, but it's not a defacto standard.

[qwytw]

Money is relative, though. I guess the question is if it's acceptable to charge a tiny symbolic fee for that cup of water if the other person's pockets are visibly overflowing with cash. If yes then it's more than reasonably to charge Musk a few million.

Turning it the other way around is it deeply immoral and sociopathic for someone to hoard massive amounts of money/resources if there are people dying or suffering around them (even if not on the spot but e.g. due to poor access to healthcare)?

[glaslong]

Given his approximate Trillionaire status, this is just what every vending machine doing income-based algorithmic pricing should charge him for EVERY bottle of water.

[Catloafdev]

Why are you assuming they aren't? The people who have those books are choosing to sell them for a price. What isn't fair?

[Analemma_]

They're paying the market price for a used book and getting the same rights out of that purchase as you or I would if we bought a used book.

[SirFatty]

I see.. so the various AI companies are in the right on this?

[infinite_spin]

I think they are in the legal sense of right, and I think they only discarded the remains of these dissected books because previous rulings (e.g. archive.org's lending practices of digital copies of books they physically owned) gave rise to a situation where destruction bore less legal risk. As for the moral case, I don't have much to say on that, we all have our own lines in that sand.

[jerf]

I would say that especially for books out of copyright, they are unquestionably legally in the right. There is no legal standing for "I like books and it makes me feel squicky when someone disrespects them". Nothing stops you from buying old books and using them as decoupage[1] fodder, using them to start a campfire, or making paper airplanes out of their paper.

Moreover, while it is emotionally appealing to some people to want to add some sort of "responsibility to society" to people who own the old books, it's a very emotional plea that can't really be manifested in the real world. As already pointed out in other places, "an old book" itself doesn't really mean much in terms of what its value is in any particular dimension. Plus, I am always deeply suspicious of anything that expands to "Other people, who are not me, should expend vast quantities of resources so that in the next five or ten times I think about this issue for the rest of my life I feel slightly better about this issue" which is what this really amounts to. I think that as superficially appealing as that may be, it's really a very hostile and demanding position to take.

Personally, to the extent that I would want to lay a "social responsibility" on the AI companies, I'd like to see something like they are either obligated, or ideally, just do it of their own free will, to make the scans of the books that are out of copyright available for some reasonable fee (ideally, "free because we like the PR", but given the scope demanding it be free is not reasonable), and without them trying to lay any further claims on the public-domain results. Trading "one old book somewhere, inaccessible to the world" for "a scan of the book and an OCR of it" I would judge a net win for society for rather a lot of these old books, which are by no means "worthless" sitting in some old collection somewhere but would be a lot more useful for being available.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoupage , since I imagine a number of people won't know what that is.

[eru]

I agree. As for making the scans available:

They could give a copy of the data once to some third party organisation that then seeds it in bittorrent or something like that. Basically, what I want to say is that this doesn't need to be an ongoing obligation for the scanner to be worthwhile for society.

[master_crab]

It can be the case that everyone in “a fight” is wrong.

[yeoyeo42]

yes. in the sense that they probably wouldnt want to do this but the law forces them to do an extremely dumb thing.

they're paying for the books, no shady things going on there. whether the publishers should deserve more than a single copy's worth is a separate question.

having the law such that its illegal to scan a book and then keep it, but legal to scan it and destroy it - gg no re there, law people retardmaxxed themselves as they tend to do with anything related to digital data.

[margalabargala]

Law aside, destructive scanning is cheaper and easier. Cutting the book into individual pages would be happening regardless, because that is the easiest, fastest, cheapest way to scan it.

[TeMPOraL]

Not necessarily, since machines for non-destructive scanning were invented and perfected a long time ago. If this is still more expensive, this very discussion shows that improved optics would've made it more than worth it to pay that extra costs. Alas, the copyright laws took away the non-destructive option.

[butlike]

Modern texts become ancient texts; given enough time.

[pfdietz]

Modern texts become piles of dust in time, given the acid paper they're printed on.

[pessimizer]

> Turns out that buying an old book for $5 and destructively scanning it for $25

More like destructively scanning it for $0.25, if you include the wear and tear on the machine, the salary of the guy who unjams it when it chokes, and recycling fees.

[silverlimetea]

This is such propaganda lol

They change the info (many buyers), destroy the source material, and now the lie is in the LLM.

That's it!

[wwweston]

Buying up old books is legal. Digitizing and distilling them arguably is too. And also:

> paying extortion fees to the copyright-mongers

Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. /s

Back in reality, the fraction of people who got into publishing books to get rich collecting rents is… not large. There’s so many other fields that are likely to reward participants with more wealth that it’s absurd — even with all the passion for the work in tech it’s probably relatively less pure.

And whatever the excesses of copyright have been, the whole bargain has always been on more pro-social foundations and stronger intellectual foundations than “extortion” sneers. It recognizes that incentives matter and work that’s valuable should be rewarded and incentivized.

A culture that takes a Robin Hood approach to low marginal cost billing points but fawns over the hypercapitalized distribution King Johns isn’t creating a freer or richer society or fighting the real cartel center, it’s indulging resentment and caricature.

[pessimizer]

> Back in reality, the fraction of people who got into publishing books to get rich collecting rents is… not large.

That's because the business is buying copyrights in bulk from those people. Copyright-mongers ≠ publishers or writers.

[TaLiTr]

> Yes yes, greedy fat cat publishing oligarchs treading on the poor put-upon scrappy AI underdogs. /s

The fact that the copyright-mongers are oppressing someone you don't like this time should probably not change your opinion of them.