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It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use
- sonicrocketman 27d agoOriginal full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.
- tescreal 27d agoThis has been reported of other major ai shops. It is a little chilling that they're going after rare books. For the record, i don't much have issue with llms and such. But... the wholesale destruction of printed books is a bridge too far.
- jimbob45 27d agoIs it? They keep the scans (somewhere). These books would have rotted in bookstores and then been trashed once those bookstores went out of business. There’s no giant “used” section at Barnes and Noble. Libraries only have so much space and they have to cycle through books as the years go by. This is easily the best fate these books could have received.
- hexapus 27d agoBullshit...they aren't sharing them with the internet archive, and at least the inventory of the defunct bookstore might have ended up with a collector or something. These slop factories have a less sound business model than any given bookstore, and you think they'll preserve those scans and share them with the world? Corporations regularly delete media for utterly capricious reasons.
- sandcat_ 27d agoIndeed. In fact I suspect that the destruction is the point. A book that Anthropic destroys the last copy of is a book that OpenAI will never have.
- api 27d agoIf they were sharing the scans it would be great but they’re not.
- bpodgursky 27d agoThey are literally not legally allowed to do this. Google Books tried. They lost. If you want this fixed, talk to your congressman, not Amazon.
- api 26d agoIs that really true or are a lot of these books out of copyright? And if they're not out of copyright why can they train on them without permission? They probably argue that training is fair use, but if I take a film and compress it with a novel data compression codec and distribute it I'm violating copyright. LLMs are lossy compression for textual information.
- tescreal 27d agoThey're removing knowledge from the public domain. I don't mean copyright: I mean the very information published is being destroyed.
- deleted 27d ago[deleted]
- m4rtink 27d agoIt is pure evel and anyone involved in this is a criminal that should be harshly punished. Books are sacred.
- Dylan16807 27d agoCopyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
- GPerson 27d agoCourts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.
- therobot24 26d agoI had always heard that Google did the 'books' project such that they were waiting for the suit because they legitimately didn't know _who_ to pay in order to achieve their objective in adding more dimensions to their search empire. The copyright law is rooted in the ability to have someone else profit off of reproducing your content. In the Anthropic lawsuit "the plaintiffs did not allege, nor did the record show, that Anthropic’s Claude LLM outputted infringing copies or substantial reproductions of the plaintiffs’ works" (https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/from-books-to-bots-key-takeaways-from-the-anthropic-fair-use-decision-for-ai-developers https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/from-bo...). Destroying your own property is legally allowed. Doing it at scale sucks, but is still allowed. As long as Anthropic et al don't distribute their digital copies then there's nothing legally wrong about what they're doing.
- jsrozner 27d agoIn times of substantial technological change, laws tend to lag substantially behind what is actually needed. And in times of substantial inequality, they lag yet further.
- m4rtink 27d agoWasn't copyright law supposed to support creation and propagation of works of art ? Instead, apparently it is A-OK or even encouraged by the same law to destroy books. That does not make any sense! Really might be high time to scrap it all.
- WalterGR 27d agoThe 404 Media report referenced in the article was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742 “We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” (404media.co) 164 points | 3 days ago | 321 comments
- IshKebab 27d ago> As the bookseller who sold them told me, there are not many people in the world who would care about them in the same way people might care about the first edition of Oliver Twist, but that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable. It does though. A lot of people seem to think "it's a book!!!" means it takes on some mystical intrinsic value. That's bullshit. There's an absolute mountain of worthless and near-worthless books. I bet the vast vast majority of these books are those books - after all that's what Amazon wants. A ton of human written text as easily as possible. They obviously aren't buying first editions of Oliver Twist, or even second editions of Harry Potter. > We’re not revealing the titles of the books included in the shipment we tracked Yeah... because then it would reveal how unimportant they are. This sort of outrage inflation is counter-productive. People see through it, lose trust, and then when something bad actually happens they won't believe you.
- sandcat_ 27d agoThen why does Amazon want them? Why train an AI on worthless books? Individually you might be right. Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such. This is cultural violence on a massive scale.
- dirasieb 27d ago>Then why does Amazon want them? quantity has a quality of its own >Some cookbook from 20 years ago probably is worthless to most people. But then there'll be one person who spends an afternoon hunting it down, bookstore to bookstore, because their aunt used to have a copy and they want to check a recipe, or some such. ask your aunt for the recipe, look it up online with a search engine, ask an LLM by describing how it tastes and the ingredients you remember, this is really not that complicated >This is cultural violence on a massive scale. could you be any more dramatic? you're acting like we are actually losing anything when in reality we're gaining from this, you'll just be able to ask the AI for the recipe instead of wasting hours and hours hunting down some old book and ordering it online for an exorbitant amount
- SturgeonsLaw 27d agoGetting real sick of capitalism systematically consuming and destroying everything it touches. These behaviours would be described as obsessive and pathological in any clinical setting, but when they're done for profit it's somehow normal.
- voidhorse 27d agoMost people agree it isn't normal. The problem is the people at the levers of power think otherwise. Capitalism as it exists in the US today, with effectively no regulation and deeply intertwined with governance, but in the wrong direction (corporations steering government) is basically the perfect exemplar of what they call a vicious circle in systems thinking. Couple that with the isolationist and individualist principles at the heart of American thinking and you have a perfect storm of runaway variable maximization (aka instability) as increasingly smaller groups of people amass increasing amounts of resources and power. Wage labor is then the perfect structure to ensure that most resistance from the bottom is suppressed before it can even really start. When you depend on the corporation to succeed for your subsistence (since there is no adequate social safety net to fall back on) taking a principled stance and refusing to destroy great works of literature becomes a highly costly endeavor for most people.
- jongjong 27d agoWhat we have is not capitalism. There is way too much gate-keeping regulation for it to be called capitalism. Just like China does not have communism. They have too much free-market activity and private ownership for it to classify as such. If you look at China and think "That's not communism", just be aware that they may also look at the west and think "That's not capitalism." Both are right. In fact both systems have converged. China took the better aspects of communism and capitalism. We took some of the worst aspects of both... Except maybe free speech; but people are working hard on removing that one! It makes sense; China came out of an era of extreme government control which has been reduced over time (compared to what it was before). In the west, government control has been on the way up and we can't even imagine how bad it can get.
- like_any_other 27d ago> As mentioned elsewhere, this is also IP theft on a massive scale. Scanning a legitimately purchased book is IP theft? How can he hold such a copyright-maximalist view, and at the same time defend the Internet Archive?
- sebastiennight 27d agoI imagine the argument could go like this. Your granpa once wrote an obscure book about this amazing way he'd found to cure diabetes. Corporation A buys all existing copies of the book, scans them, destroys the originals, and sets up a commercial business offering a monthly subscription to alleviate diabetes pains with this new method they claim they discovered. Person B borrowed the book from a municipal library, Xerox'd it, and keeps a free ledger, open to all who want to read old books, as a way to safeguard free access to the world's knowledge. Do you think there could exist any possible logic by which some people would defend person B and try to stop Corporation A?
- like_any_other 27d agoIn this hypothetical, my grandpa didn't patent this way to cure diabetes (otherwise the company would owe him royalties, assuming the patent hadn't expired). So it reduces to a corporation selling services based on public-domain knowledge (I am ignoring the part where a miraculous advance is confined to a single unknown book). Lots of corporations do this, and there's nothing wrong with it. I'm sure people would prefer if Amazon also offered library-like access to the book, but how is it theft? I'm not asking about "any possible logic" - he called it theft.
- hattmall 27d agoWords are subjective. The person is saying that it is theft and if the law doesn't define it as such then the law should change. The implication is that taking from the public domain is theft if you then make it unavailable by destructive processes which render the public unable to access that which was previously available.
- anonymousiam 27d agoIt's a win-win-win for Amazon if they destroy the source in the process of scanning it. They get the AI training data, and it's cheaper for them to destroy the book in the process. Destroying the book ensures that it will be more difficult for competitors to scan the same content, thereby increasing the value of the data they've scanned. Lastly, there's a misguided belief among some that it's somehow less of a copyright violation if the source is destroyed, but it's a violation either way unless the entity doing the scanning has permission from the copyright holder to make the copy.
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- 8note 27d agoi dont get it. this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book. clearly fair use. does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? theyre buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy. if you want the books preserved, maybe fund your libraries to get a copy or two?
- voidhorse 27d agoIt's possible for someone to do something socially reprehensible and entirely distasteful and to be perfectly within the letter of the law while doing so. The article doesn't emphasize copyright issues or fair use, because that isn't the point. The post is trying to argue that the act is not sustainable and needlessly destructive, in pursuit of something that many people believe has limited value or unproven value, which is true. Not the case here, but it's also important to keep in mind that laws too, can be unjust and immoral. Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws.
- ronsor 27d ago> Much of humanity's progress has involved the abolishment of immoral laws. So you are saying to abolish copyright?
- noosphr 27d agoThese are books that no one else wants and would get pulped otherwise. No one has space to save the 1754 edition of "whale blubber cookery on the open seas".
- brunburnburnbur 27d agoYeah but I unironically would love to have a copy of that on my bookshelf. It likely has fantastic illustrations! This is the whole problem. A lot of people assuming they can speak unilaterally and with authority on what other people value or should find valuable. It's disgraceful. What happens to the old hacker ethos? I'd never thought I'd see the day when, on a site called hacker news the majority of posters are defending the right of a large corporation to destroy public goods permanently just to be able to charge people more for "intelligence as a service".
- ChrisArchitect 27d agoDiscussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49310725 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49068738
- areoform 27d agoI think this is impressive backwards reasoning. Before my lifetime, copyright law all but choked and killed the public domain. And now everything is stale and the same. This particular battle was lost with Google Books and the attempt to make the world's largest library. The modern library of Alexandria. But then copyright lawyers got involved to get their pound of flesh. And here we are. I am upset about the destruction of knowledge. Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago. I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them. Everyone is impressively short sighted.
- majormajor 27d ago>And now everything is stale and the same. This has been less true every year since Usenet and Geocities. Much of the stuff on their was pirated, but that was the "stale and same" stuff you're complaining about anyway. The rest of the stuff was all kinds of original, good and bad. There's never been more total "content" and more total variety. You just have to look around for it (but that's also never been easier). Letting AI companies try to profit off of all that creativity forever while choking the ability of the creators to make future revenue off of it is exactly what would actually lead to a "everything is stale and the same" situation. Preserving variety and novelty of new creation would look like putting in new restrictions to reduce this not-envisioned-when-the-laws-were-made sort of read-once-slop-forever usage.
- Aurornis 27d ago> Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago Most paper books don’t make it a thousand years, let alone a hundred. Your local library is probably purging piles of books every year and nobody sheds a tear. > I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them It would be cheaper to buy a second copy of the book and put it in a different warehouse where it can continue to go unread as it did before the AI companies bought it. The cost of non-destructive scanning and rebinding books is crazy high.
- Aurornis 27d agoThe full headline tries to equate this to The Internet Archive’s recent legal troubles. For a refresher: The Internet Archive scanned books then shared them online, trying to claim that converting them into digital copies qualified as a derivative work. You don’t have to be a lawyer to see how that claim doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny. The LLM companies are not redistributing the works. They are using them for training. This blog post calls it IP theft, but it has actually been litigated in court already. Using books for training does not qualify as theft or redistribution, even though some people have different opinions about the moral angles. One of those same lawsuits also extracted a huge settlement from Anthropic for using digital downloads from pirate sites. The conclusion was that the only acceptable way for them to use the books is to buy them and scan them. The courts forced it to be this way. The current hand-wringing about the destruction of books is based on claims that they’re doing it to rare books that are also valuable. So far nobody has been able to actually provide an example of one of these books that is supposedly ultra-rare, but also valuable, but also only available at one of these book sellers that sells these things in bulk. We’re supposed to assume that one of these books might actually be super valuable but also super rare and also only available at these places they’re buying from.
- wotamess 27d agoEveryone turning into Metallica. The whole "copyright infringement is theft" meme seems to have stuck. 20 years ago it was all "information wants to be free" and "infringement is not theft; being deprived of speculative profit is not a loss." How the turn tables.
- ronsor 27d agoYou just discovered that principles are rare. Now let me show you my preferences of convenience. "Information wants to be free as long as I benefit from not paying."
- wotamess 27d agoI didn't "just" discover such a generalization at all; well aware entropy erodes state. I "just" compared prior experience and current experience specifically.
- ssl-3 27d agoLars has seemed to me like such a basket case this entire time. He's lead Metallica through the "Copy our tapes! Let everyone hear our music!" early days, through the "They're stealing our master recordings!" Napster and Senate hearings era, and come all the way back 'round to "I’m just happy that fucking anybody cares about what we’re doing and shows up to see us play and still stream or buy or steal our records or whatever.” [https://consequence.net/2023/09/metallica-lars-ulrich-stream-buy-steal-records/ https://consequence.net/2023/09/metallica-lars-ulrich-stream...] 2 out of 3 ain't bad, I guess.
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- schoen 27d agoIt's not necessarily doctrinally that crazy in copyright law. Some courts have considered AI training on copyrighted works a "transformative" use (traditionally more protected in fair use analysis), while providing human beings access to the works a "consumptive" use (traditionally less protected). There's also a fair use consideration that favors noncommercial use compared to commercial use, but that's not the only question, and the statute doesn't say clearly how to combine the fair use factors. But it's possible under the Copyright Act that some commercial uses of copyrighted works could be considered fair uses while some noncommercial uses could simultaneously not be considered fair uses.
- rkapsoro 27d agoI remember reading a scene where this exact thing was going on in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End: there, the books were being shredded and scanned as tiny bits and stitched together in software similar to shotgun genome sequencing. At any rate, I ought to pick it up again and finish reading it...
- 999900000999 27d agoI still think the solution would be for Amazon to release the EBook of any rare book they scan and destroy. Then setup a fund to compensate copyright holders. I guess publishers do have a right to pull certain works from print though.
- satvikpendem 27d agoWell, this is what happens when they weren't allowed to use digital only copies, as they now have much more of an ability to get around copyright with physical items. The right thing would've been to allow digital items to also have the first sale doctrine, but we don't, so AI training companies must resort to destroying physical books in the process of scanning. The Cobra Effect strikes again.
- rpdillon 27d agoThis is precisely correct. The logic being applied rarely extends to second-order effects.
- tescreal 27d agoI wonder how much of AI is about owning all knowledge, deskilling the masses, reducing access, etc.? The end goal might be actual legit surfdom. Without the means to elevate the people's knowledge (and the companies have already stated they Benevolently Protect Users From Harmful Data™), it quickly becomes a situation where they control all narratives. It took less than a generation for social media to make the spectacular mess of discourse we now have. How long before all knowledge is mediated and moderated? Who's to say? I'll check back in 10 years :)
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- elroyjetson 27d agoIsn't this part of the plot of Vernor Vinge's novel Rainbows End? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End_(Vinge_novel)