Comment by tencentshill

6 hours ago

So they're not valuable... except to AI companies. They should pay a fair amount.

They are paying a fair amount. In the ballpark of $5 per book.

You know, piracy online is nice and simple - but it's kind of hard to get physical media without paying what the previous owner considers "a fair amount" to part with it.

> They should pay a fair amount.

they should pay the marginal value that the next buyer would buy.

Do you also think that a person dying of thirst ought to pay the maximum price they could possibly pay for water?

  • > the marginal value that the next buyer would buy

    Well the argument is that they should pay for the right to produce derivative works not for the physical copy.

  • It might be me but I fail to see the equivalence of AI companies with thirst deaths. That', or maybe because it's a strawman.

    • The point is that you can buy a book for a few bucks, read it, and have its insights completely available to you. But people are demanding that LLM companies pay far more to publishers for the same copies

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  • If Elon Musk is dying of thirst then the price of that glass of water is set at (pinky to side of mouth) one million dollars.

    • Given his approximate Trillionaire status, this is just what every vending machine doing income-based algorithmic pricing should charge him for EVERY bottle of water.

    • Doing that would be considered deeply immoral and sociopathic in any sane culture. Do you really want to live in a society that finds such attitudes acceptable?

      Instead of blindly jumping on a manipulated outrage bandwagon, people would do well to maybe read some of those old books, not even the rare ones - they tend to contain plenty of parables and stories explaining basics of morality and civilized conduct. We used to teach that to kids at homes and in primary education...

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Why are you assuming they aren't? The people who have those books are choosing to sell them for a price. What isn't fair?

They're paying the market price for a used book and getting the same rights out of that purchase as you or I would if we bought a used book.