I've been boycotting Amazon since 2004. Waiting for everybody else to see it too. ... See it yet?!?? Everybody?!??
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2026
803 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
87367 readers
4025 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
I wish I had fewer opportunities to post this gif, I hate it
Why not just scan them carefully and use the pictures?
The answer to that question is obvious. They can do it 1000x faster cutting the spin and sending all the pages through a scanner. Otherwise you have to have something flip through every page and take a picture.
I figured. But sometimes the inconvenience should be part of it. I am fucking sorry. This is just disgusting...
Amazon, destroying books, this is such a full circle moment for them
They also love to publish stuff exclusively through Amazon so libraries won't get it.
Can they at least provide all the scans to the public for free? It's not like anyone is going to care if they violate copyright, that only applies to regular people.
That's why they are scanning them and destroying them. Someone realized they can capitalize knowledge. We're going to get the privilege of letting billionaires gate keep information and knowledge
Unfortunately, that would violate copyright law. In fact, the whole point of the destruction is to circumvent copyright, as apparently there was a ruling that scanning, tokenizing, and then destroying the original is transformative enough to be considered, "fair use."
You think they give a fuck? These people are going to get to the point where they would take aim at random people with rifles and shoot them for fun and then act like they did nothing wrong.
Of course they would see an issue with that... If they are aiming themselves, it means they can be aimed at... So they will do it via drone.
You are definitely right. It just sucks that destroying books is "fair use" while using movie clips to make a parody video gets taken down with little recourse.
Friends don’t let friends use any form of Amazon they can choose to.
Amazon wasn't caught doing shit. "Caught" implies there is a possibility of consequences. Two days from now nobody is going to remember this story and the world will move on and there will be no consequences for this.
"caught" also implies they've been hiding it... It's been out in the open how they scan books to train AI for a while now.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
They tracked the shipment to a site at a massive Amazon warehouse in Nevada, where workers say their job is to strip the spines off of books they receive so they can quickly scan their pages, destroying them in the process.
So what they're saying is, we should start making as many legit-looking books full of bullshit and gibberish as possible, then send them to Nevada where they can be used to help "train" their AI.
More alarming was the upshot of that lawsuit: a judge ruled that because Anthropic was turning the physical texts into digital ones and destroying the original copies, it was “transformative” and therefore didn’t violate copyright law.
So by that token if someone digitizes a physical medium and makes it available to the public copyright is no longer valid. Otherwise, having it ingested by an AI has no purpose it it's not meant to be referenced in response to requests by the end user.
You are witnessing the last days of copyright of any form right now - mark my words!
That is probably the ultimate conclusion. Except there will be some bullshit exception for Disney and all the other mega media corporations.
No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.
SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people's printed works.
Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it's passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.
But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn't apply to anything else. So you can't use "physical medium" because books are a special case and have their own special US law.
For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Anthropic - I want to convert it to weights for use in massive matrix multiplication operations.
Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.
Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.
- Book - I want to read them.
- Google - I want to convert it to a searchable database of terms that can refer you to the correct ISBN.
And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it's just under a different framework known as the DMCA.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to watch the movie.
That's not transformative.
- DVD - I want to watch the movie.
- MP4 - I want to take clips to make memes.
That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole "fair use" thing.
This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I'm not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren't true.
And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren't LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it's impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.
load more comments
(6 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
fucking book burners
It's like if Fahrenheit 451 had the firefighters meticulously remove the spines and digitize the books before burning them. Amazon is buying a single copy of these books, and destroying the books to make it faster to digitize. Just not at all book burning.
You should be pissed about them using other peoples works to train their AI behemoth for profit. Not make a false equivalence to book burning...
that information is as good as gone if its in the hands of corporation while they destroy the original. also, you cant get the original info back from the training data, what they are doing is kind of like putting the information in a blender.
and since they destroy the original books, no one else can have them. They also destroy piece of history since physical book is immutable while digital information can be tampered with. With rare books its possible they are destroying the last copy of the book, no way to know for sure.
And i'm already beyond pissed that they use others work for profit. It has already been demonstrated that corporations are above any law, as long as they can manage their bribes and connections. You should trust corporations as much as you would a demon if demons were real.
view more: next ›