I think this is impressive backwards reasoning.

Before my lifetime, copyright law all but choked and killed the public domain. And now everything is stale and the same.

This particular battle was lost with Google Books and the attempt to make the world's largest library. The modern library of Alexandria.

But then copyright lawyers got involved to get their pound of flesh. And here we are.

I am upset about the destruction of knowledge. Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago. I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them.

Everyone is impressively short sighted.

> Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years ago

Most paper books don’t make it a thousand years, let alone a hundred. Your local library is probably purging piles of books every year and nobody sheds a tear.

> I think it's a mistake to not work with a non-profit, use cheap COTS non-destructive scanning, and write off the costs of rebinding them and rehousing them

It would be cheaper to buy a second copy of the book and put it in a different warehouse where it can continue to go unread as it did before the AI companies bought it. The cost of non-destructive scanning and rebinding books is crazy high.

"And now everything is stale and the same."

AI content is not exactly helping everything feeling like Extruded Product.

>And now everything is stale and the same.

This has been less true every year since Usenet and Geocities. Much of the stuff on their was pirated, but that was the "stale and same" stuff you're complaining about anyway. The rest of the stuff was all kinds of original, good and bad. There's never been more total "content" and more total variety. You just have to look around for it (but that's also never been easier).

Letting AI companies try to profit off of all that creativity forever while choking the ability of the creators to make future revenue off of it is exactly what would actually lead to a "everything is stale and the same" situation. Preserving variety and novelty of new creation would look like putting in new restrictions to reduce this not-envisioned-when-the-laws-were-made sort of read-once-slop-forever usage.