AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books

Artificial intelligence labs are in a new arms race to buy up millions of rare books, slicing them open, scanning the pages and pulping the remains — sparking concerns that the last remaining copies of out-of-print texts are being destroyed on an industrial scale.

ISBNdb notes that “print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination”.

“Millions of the most valuable books have never been digitised. They exist only in physical form, scattered across library shelves, used bookstores, and out-of-print catalogues. We get them to you at scale.”

www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/ai-labs-buy-scan-shred-millions-of-rare-books/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9

What’s the point of destroying books after scanning them instead of reselling them apart from *hurr durr we are evil*?

Copyright. They mustn’t make a copy. There is legal precedent that confirms it’s okay to transform the copy you bought into digital format. The Internet Archive relies a lot on that. I think they actually litigated it in the first place. So that’s why the copyright heads are going so absolutely apeshit. If no one’s charging you rent for using some data, then it’s “unethical”.