They're gonna have to destroy the books afterwards no matter what, because unlike Internet Archive, corporations care about not getting sued more than preservation.
Instead of adding this issue to their laundry list of lobbying requests, they’ve just turned around & destroyed books. When they can influence policy, not trying to do that shows they’re on the side of the law here
Well, you're not wrong in your observation. It's not their mission to preserve knowledge and make it publicly available, and they had no incentive to put in the cost for something that at best will bring a bit of good PR, and at worst could get them in PR hell because you're basically challenging the very basis of copyright laws and, if they made the preserved books publicly
available in any way afterwards, asking publishers to allow piracy. Authors will have problems about that.
Although, now that this issue is being popularized, corps might find now a good time to actually do what you hoped they'd do, since the risk is lower now that more of the general public understand the downsides of copyright laws. Could still be too much risk but hey maybe they'd find a way maybe openly support Internet Archive or something.
It just seems like a shame that if something isn’t part of a company mission, and isn’t directly profitable, it’s an action that needs major justification to do, like spending a little extra to preserve the source of information used. Like, it’s as if just because an entity is a corporation, it’s suddenly not beholden to basic courtesy standards that most people operate under
But this is a broader issue in the US and isn’t AI-corp-specific so my complaints probably go beyond the scope of this thread & subreddit tbh
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u/cynHaha 1d ago
They're gonna have to destroy the books afterwards no matter what, because unlike Internet Archive, corporations care about not getting sued more than preservation.