Comment by buran77
7 days ago
TechCrunch is trying too hard to make a connection in the title there. Amazon was trying to make money then as it is now. Their selling of books at the beginning was no more principled than the destruction of books now.
This is the legal loophole that allows them to do what they need to do, and the benefit of doing it outweighs the modicum of outrage this title will generate.
Edit. Because I see my statement confused all the HN experts:
Anthropic's version of this was Project Panama [1]. The destruction of the original allows them to keep a digital copy in the AI training dataset. Quoting from the page:
> Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction and digitization of legally purchased books constituted fair use
Is it a “loophole” that you can buy something and burn it? That’s how property ownership works. If the books were really so rare and valuable then the original owner should have given them to a museum rather than sell them as scrap. Yet no one who is complaining right now cared about them before Amazon got involved.
> Is it a “loophole” that you can buy something and burn it? That’s how property ownership works.
It sounds shocking if you're missing the context and only rely on the blogspam which is this TechCrunch article.
They aren't buying the books only to destroy them but to build an AI training dataset, which means they're making a digital copy. This becomes a copyright issue. The destruction is the legal loophole that allows them to keep the digital copy as the only copy in circulation and be considered fair use as decided by a judge (see below).
The concept of ownership means you can do anything you want with the object, the book in this case. Not with the content, like make or distribute copies. The scanning machines are cutting the spine of the book, feeding the pages to scanners, and then destroying the physical copy.
Anthropic's version of this was Project Panama [1]. Quoting from the page:
> Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction and digitization of legally purchased books constituted fair use
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama
No, that's not the loophole. The loophole is that a US federal judge recently ruled that scanning a book for the purpose of training an AI is "fair use" and hence legal _if and only if_ the book is destroyed in the process. If you retain the original, you would be creating an unauthorized copy, but if the original is destroyed, then it is permissable as format shift: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...
Sometimes original owner does not know that it is a first edition single copy. For them it is an old book. There have been many cases where owners did not know true value of their antiques.
Well in this case the original owner doesn’t know, the purchaser doesn’t know, the reporter doesn’t know, you and I don’t know. So what actually makes these books rare?
Its somewhat ironic.
The worst part of Amazon destroying priceless old books in the quest to build the torment nexus is the hypocrisy
They obviously aren’t priceless if Amazon is buying them for pennies.
all due respect but if they buy them they can do whatever they want with them. not like they are people and not like you have a right to them either. not even like you would have been able to acquire them yourself.
You're not really responding to the post, which is about the hypocrisy.
"They're allowed to be a hypocrite" doesn't mean they aren't a hypocrite.
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