The Internet Archive tries to be that magical library, but they can only scan and physically archive what is sent to them.

> I really don't know what people objecting to this imagine typically happens to old, unwanted books.

In the UK at least, people usually take them to a second hand / charity shop, who sort through them and send the valuable ones to auction (typically early editions, 100+ years old) and then either sell them themselves (for recent books that are easy to get rid of) or sell them to specialised second-hand bookshops.

Most of the specialised second-hand bookshops rarely throw books away, usually if nobody buys them after a couple of years they end up in the extreme discount piles (20p, 50p etc) and probably only trashed if they still don't sell from there.

They're buying the books from resellers, not rescuing these books from dumpsters. Stop being an apologist.

95 years after publication. Many other countries also have an X years after the author's death clause where X varies between countries but is at least 70.

There are also other weird issues such as the UK having a clause protecting Peter Pan (so a children's hospital gets royalties) and the King James translation of the bible (under Crown copyright) that extend the copyright even further.

In short, it's a mess.

The thing I find most hypocritical though is that they are probably never share their libraries with anyone. After scanning, downloading, stealing, overloading websites and everything in between, to acquire enough data for their stupid machine, they're not going to share their data? I get that most of it can't be shared, but a lot can. There's no reason why you need to destroy multiple copies of a book from 1880, when it's free to share.

At the same time I can understand keeping track of when each books enters public domain might also be an absolute nightmare, and I wouldn't blame the AI companies for not wanting to deal with that. For the stuff they absolutely know is clear, they should provide dumps for everyone to download.

Right, that's my point.

These generally are not books people care about. The information contained therein was doomed.

Now the information has been digitally preserved and a digestion of the information will be made publicly available.

Funnily the argument made just a few months ago by many rights holders who wanted their pound of flesh was that, if prompted a certain way, exact text could be retrieved.

Having or not having a book is absolutely fuzzy. If you have a translation, do you have the book? Even if, like the Odyssey, there are hundreds of wildly varying translations? What about an abridged copy? What about the Sparknotes version? If you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, do you have a copy of Pride And Prejudice? Certainly more so than if you have neither.

The scan and destroy method is what a judge allowed to do in order to have a copy of the book in the training dataset. With the physical copy destroyed there's still only 1 copy in circulation. Once "inside" an LLM I don't know if anyone decided unequivocally that it's copyright infringement or not, and if that counts as a second copy.

There's no technical reason why an LLM couldn't reproduce verbatim some of the training material. It's sort of a lossy statistical compression engine. Enough of the info will survive to the output in the original form. With the amount of data and the commercial nature it's hard to argue fair-use. But nobody tested this in court. I'm not even sure the US wants to ever test this. Why even attempt something that has a non-0 chance to sabotage your most promising industry/bubble in ages?

No, US copyright law allows them to keep a single digital copy. The hypothetical issue is with them maintaining two copies, one digital and one physical, when they only purchased one.

They're absolutely keeping the digitized copies. They're not going to just train a single model.

Bad at quoting, good at digesting and regurgitating. The concepts are preserved even if quotes aren't.

I'd rather a digital copy exist in someone's hands than a rotting physical copy.

The AI companies’ working assumption is that if someone found it worth printing, it has enough information content to help train a model. That assumption might be invalid with some of the more rambling self-published books, however.

Your point is understood but the crux of the issue is a bit similar to capital punishment, the argument is that risk of losing even one innocent person or useful book isn't worth taking; specially considering the value created for society as part of such risky undertaking, whatever it is exercising capital punishment or scanning and destroying books.

Preservation would be cool but what does that have to do with anything? The system is that the remaining copies have private owners and the private owners can do anything they want with them, including sell them or shred them.

Most of these owners aren't doing anything particular to preserve them, they're stacked up with 10,000 other TV Guides in a hoarder's moldy basement. Anyone interested in keeping October 1994's TV Guide pristine has had over 30 years to procure and protect their copy.

These particular buyers are converting their copy to a digital one that's getting some kind of use, which is better than the fate of 99.9% of the other copies.

It's more that, we don't need to preserve a million copies of the same mundane book. Losing a few copies to AI training is fine.

When applied to ordinary mundane objects, this is the mindset that leads to pathological hording behavior. Ultimately I think it's rooted in a fear of, an attempt to deny, mortality and the passage of time.