An investigation by 404 Media found that Amazon bought a shipment of rare books so it could scan and destroy them to train AI.
  • joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
    31·
    9 days ago

    If I was the owner of the only copy of an important book, I would have the legal right to destroy it, but nobody could argue convincingly that I did a good thing.

    I’d argue that, if the destruction was done to digitize the book, what you did was a good thing. Would you disagree?

    • Fluffy Kitty Cat@slrpnk.netEnglish
      71·
      9 days ago

      There’s a huge difference, an absolute chasm, between non-destructive scanning, which was always an option by the way, for the purposes of putting it in a public archive and And destructive scanning with the intent to hide it from the public where it may never surface for all we know.

      • General_Effort@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        9 days ago

        There’s a huge difference, an absolute chasm, between non-destructive scanning, which was always an option by the way, for the purposes of putting it in a public archive

        Like Anna’s Archive, or Sci-Hub. Famously legal.

        If only they uploaded everything to those archives, the scanning would be perfectly fiiiiine.

      • joe@lemmy.worldEnglish
        32·
        9 days ago

        First, I was discussing the hypothetical put forth by that other person.

        Second, “hide it from the public” is almost certainly a function of copyright law. Just because you are allowed to digitize a book doesn’t mean you’re allowed to distribute it.