In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
In the filings, Anthropic states, as reported by the Washington Post: “Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world. We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this.”
When a bookstore goes out of business or just can’t sell a book, they don’t return it to the printers, they tear off the cover, return that and by law have to throw the rest of the book in the trash and destroy it. So books are already destroyed by the millions. When I was a kid our hometown bookstore went out of business and I watched them throw away 2 metal dumpsters full of coverless books. If they were destroying ancient texts or valuable copies, that would be more something to get excited about. I doubt that they were doing that though.
Yeah that’s exactly it. James Patterson, for example, has written dozens of books, and there are billions of his books alone. They’re taking one of each, cutting off the binding, and scanning the pages. This is standard procedure for common books.
So why don’t they want people knowing about it? Because a lot of people are anti-AI and will run misleading stories like this.
I’m as anti-AI as the next guy, but unlike other companies scraping all of reddit and stealing art off the Internet, these guys are doing it mostly properly by paying for the books. They still don’t have a license to use the material in this manner, though.
They don’t need a license to use material in this way under extant US law. Copyright is overwhelmingly about reproduction rather than consumption.
They also initially took content from libgen, which is a fair bit less legal. Personally, I have mixed feelings about all of this. On the one hand, I don’t like some shitty for-profit AI company making money from the collective works of civilisation. On the other hand, I think copyright protects works for far too long anyway and most should be in the commons already. Mind you, I would be more sympathetic if Anthropic et al. were doing all this for research purposes instead of capitalism. Maybe that would be a better copyright reform, in that it expires much more quickly than the current laws (say 10 years) but restricts third parties making a profit for a longer period. Likely that would be complex to design and enforce, however.
That much was absolutely is something to get worked up about. Just because it happens more than people realize, that doesn’t make it okay.
Words and ideas don’t become sacred when they are committed to paper. Unless they destroyed the last copy of something that has not been digitized, this is totally fine.
I didn’t say words were sacred, but destroying millions of books is a colossal waste of resources. This is not totally fine.
The resources were wasted by the publishers when they transformed the resources into a finished product with very limited utility and reusability. Books on shelves are not resources.
Sure, but it is rather a waste of paper, ink, manufacturing and transportation capacity etc. It’s not the only instance of this of course, waste of unsold inventory exists in just about any industry that sells physical products, but it’s still frustrating to see it.
This seems more like an indictment of the practice of physical publishing than destructive book scanning, in which case I generally agree. There are a host of industries with baked-in inefficiencies that our life experiences have conditioned us to accept as normal or unavoidable when really have no business persisting in the modern world. Printed books is definitely one of them.