alt Hacker NewsFirst of all, it IS destroyed and it is a big deal. Hardcover copies of books especially 1st - 2nd edition ones (even with mistakes) are rarer than digital scans.
Maybe the Bodleian Library at Oxford University should give all their rare books to AI companies to scan and destroy them since it is not a "big deal" anyway.
Except that when they did do a pilot with OpenAI to scan these rare books, [0] they did NOT destroy them. I wonder why?
[0] https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/research-partnerships...
Replies
quietsegfault • today at 5:56 PM
Why is it a big deal?
Do you think there's no difference between the books curated at Oxford University and the crap that Amazon is buying?
Why wonder? The answer is abundantly clear if you follow the news. If a book is copyrighted under U.S. law, scanning and destroying counts as a format conversion which qualifies it as fair use, so there is no need to negotiate with copyright holders. See Judge William Alsup’s decision. If Anthropic did not destroy the books after scanning it would have not won the lawsuit, and scanning would be illegal. If a book is already out of copyright then of course they do not have to destroy it afterwards.