The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed.

These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.

With many old books, a big part of the problem is that it's non-trivial to determine who owns the copyright. Sometimes the contract would say the copyright reverts to the author after a certain amount of time out of print,but you have to go dig through old contracts to figure out whether that's the case for any given book.

It is also the case that the copyright holders are often putting restrictions around use of electronic forms that are driving the desire to use physical copies. I doubt AI companies would use a single physical book if they could avoid it - absent the legal cloud over electronic rights.

I have no evidence but I can't help suspecting in part the publicity around this is driven in part by rights holders that want to force AI companies back to e-books where they can force them into licensing deals.

Yes. I dont understand at all what AA is worried about. One copy of a book is no big deal? good will and used book stores throw out a lot more than that.

They also only scan books that are easily and cheaply available, which means they are either not rare or have no significance.

Books that are rare of have historic significance will surely be in museums or libraries and not going away for pennies.

Not the copyright holders, "we the people": Copyright is an artificial legal construct that was repeatedly ratcheted up over and over again.

Unfortunately 50 years after the death of the author (or 50 years after publication for corporate owned works) has been locked in as a minimum term through international treaties, so it'll be somewhat hard to lower it beyond that, but many countries (including the US) enforce much longer terms, so that would be a first lever that could be applied quickly.

Maybe countries could could also establish an exception for out of print books offered to the public for free, or a general "library exemption" for public archives after a certain number of years?

I'm sure one of the AI companies would be willing to host a LibGen style library as a PR measure if legally allowed (with sign up required for rate limiting and as an extra benefit for the company to get daily active users).

RE "...Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest...."

Why are AI companies forced to shred books?

Copyright holders are certainly responsible for keeping unavailable works inaccessible, but shredding is mostly an industrial scanning decision, not a copyright requirement

> Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than one copy.

The OP article sounds quite opposite though - that AI companies are doing exactly this - destroying books so only they have the scanned content.

They don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.

If only this complaint was being posted by an organization ideologically opposed to copyright itself!

> Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.

What? Even if there are no copyright holders, the AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap.

Are you expecting the authors/publishers to send digital copies to AI companies directly? Or expecting AI companies to preserve the physical copies indefinitely? Both are not gonna happen, copyrighted or not.

We the people in the society who have the power to make laws through democratic means are the ones locking these books up.

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If you're buying second hadn books by the lot, you'll get a lot of duplicates and its eaiser to scan wholesale and dedupe in the computers than it is to try to run a sorting operataion on "things".

mr. vernor-vinge's "Rainbows End" is oddly prescient ! Highly recommended nevertheless.

> force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.

Nothing forces them to shred books, they do it because it's slightly cheaper that way.

It's also the regulation, where most systems still look at "one pirate copy" = "one sale of lost profits", especially when pirates end up in court. If the book (or game or whatever) is not sold anymore in any way where you could give the copyright holder money in an easy accessible way (eg. buy it on amazon, or a local bookstore), they shouldn't be able to claim losses from piracy, since they clearly don't want your money.

On the other hand, there are grey zones here, the lord of the rings books (still copyrighted and easily obtained pretty much everywhere) have been translated into my language many decades ago, and many of us read and liked those translations, but when the movies came out, a new translator did a new translation, where they changed a lot of things, including the last names of bilbo and frodo (Bogataj->Bisagin) and the Shire (Grofija->Šajerska), and the old version is sadly available only in paper form on second hand markets. On one hand, copying that if you only want this specific version would not cause a lost sale, on the other, you can get new translations (or english originals) pretty much everywhere.

Copyright allows you to sell book you have and does not force you to shread it.

They are not forced to shread them by copyright.

I was wondering what the pro book shredding take was going to be. Why destroy the book after scanning? You can create a beautiful library of rare books with all the AI debt bubble.

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this is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...

Sorry, is your stance seriously that authors and publishers should digitize and freely distribute their work, at their own expense?

Also, who’s forcing AI companies to “ingest” books in such a destructive way?

Also also, if there’s one thing I’ve learned from AI scrapers, it’s that they’d never scan the exact same thing multiple times at the expense of public access to the resource.