AI companies destroying books [LWN.net]

AI companies destroying books

Posted Sep 3, 2026 8:21 UTC (Thu) by taladar (subscriber, #68407)
In reply to: AI companies destroying books by dvdeug
Parent article: Debian weighs eight options in vote on LLM usage

Sounds to me like anyone (AI company or otherwise) who first turns a physical copy of a book into a digital copy should be required to deliver a digital copy to some archives (ideally not just that one library of congress in the US, that seems like a single point of failure, just one defunding away from disaster). But wait, then all the authors and publishers are probably going to cry "theft" again.

to post comments

AI companies destroying books

Posted Sep 3, 2026 10:05 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (3 responses)

From what I understand, it's in the "fair-use" doctrine in the US that allows this destructive scanning in the first place. The act of scanning itself it probably illegal in Europe. So they're buying books in Europe and shipping them to the US to be scanned under the more relaxed laws there. But even in the US, companies putting their scanned books in an archive for public benefit probably kills their "fair-use" defense.

In Europe, museums, libraries and such are allowed to scan their own archives for the public benefit, but the AI companies can't use that exemption. It would arguably be in the public interest to find a way for the scanned book of the AI companies to find its way to archival institutions but that would require a law change (Europe is largely Civil Law, lawsuits won't help you here).

The irony is that there are plenty of institutions that would love to collect every book and digitally archive it and would be legally allowed to do so, but they never have the funding. And the AI companies have money to burn but aren't allowed to do the archiving.

AI companies destroying books

Posted Sep 4, 2026 7:26 UTC (Fri) by taladar (subscriber, #68407) [Link] (2 responses)

One more data point for the argument that Copyright actually leads to cultural destruction (abandonware being the best known one on that side).

AI companies destroying books

Posted Sep 4, 2026 12:18 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (1 responses)

That can be fixed by limiting copyright terms to something reasonable like 25-30 years instead of the current (in the USA) life of author plus 70 years, or 95 years for a work made for hire.

Straying

Posted Sep 4, 2026 14:05 UTC (Fri) by jzb (editor, #7867) [Link]

As much as I support the idea of "fixing" copyright and capitalism... we've probably strayed past the "on-topic" line at this point, and certainly past the scope of the discussion. There's no path for Debian to do either of those things through a GR, sadly.

Can we end this here and return to regularly scheduled programming?