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12 days agoI have no clue if that’s true, but that sounds pretty far fetched imo.
As already mentioned, the books being purchased are not like, the only sole remaining copies of the work. Many of the authors are probably still alive, and there’s likely thousands or millions of each book distributed all over the country of origin, if not the world, in the hands of individuals, bookshops, libraries, archives, etc.
A judge said it was fair use when they purchased and solely used the books for AI training without redistributing them or a copy of them afterwards, so they’re just doing that in order to not get sued again. Not much more to it.
Yeah, I wish this was the case. I don’t think that under Anthropic’s prior ruling at least, that it would be allowed though, since after donating to the library (assuming they non-destructively scanned the books) they would then have to discard the entire set of digital copies they made, as that would mean they copied the work, and thus didn’t engage in a legal “transformation” of that work that maintains only one copy, and thus there would be no reason for them to do it in the first place.
I wish our copyright law could at least consider a donation to a library as equivalent to destruction of a work so companies could keep a scan but not have it be considered a copy. That way at least we’d be getting the giant influx of books going to libraries from AI training bs.