404 Media reveals Amazon destroys rare books while scanning for AI training
Investigation tracks shipment of rare volumes to Amazon warehouse in Las Vegas where books are destructively scanned and discarded.
What to know
- 404 Media's investigation tracked rare books via tracking device to Amazon's Las Vegas warehouse, revealing the company destroys books while scanning them for AI training data.
- The destruction method is faster and cheaper but ethically questionable, especially when compared to the Internet Archive's non-destructive one-page-at-a-time approach.
- Commenters debate whether this constitutes copyright infringement, fair use, or an acceptable practice when companies own the physical books they purchase.
The dispute Whether Amazon's destructive scanning constitutes fair use or unethical destruction of cultural knowledge, and whether the legal/ethical problem lies with Amazon's practice or with broken copyright law. · positions read across 16 posts and comments
Amazon's destruction of rare books is wasteful and wrong; the company should use non-destructive scanning like the Internet Archive.
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“The idea is destroy so others can't get the data too... There's no good reason to destroy the books other than myopia.”
godelski · Hacker News
Amazon legally owns the books it purchases and can do what it wants with them; the practice is clearly fair use.
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“this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book. clearly fair use. does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? they're buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy.”
8note · Hacker News ↗
The problem is flawed copyright law that incentivizes destruction; better copyright reform would align corporate interests with public benefit.
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“Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.”
Dylan16807 · Hacker News
“There's monetary value, obviously, but there are a lot of other types of value. There's historical value, intellectual value, sentimental value. All sorts of things, and all of those the AI companies don't care about.”
Bookseller who sold rare books · 404 Media (cited in observationalepidemiology.blogspot.com)
Amazon AI company purchasing and destroying books404 Media Investigative outletInternet Archive Non-profit digitization organization
The record 1 articles and posts · last 30 days
What people are saying 15 voices from 1 site · best of 16 · verbatim
- Does the fair use doctrine truly protect Amazon's destructive scanning for commercial AI training, or should courts treat it differently than academic use?
- If copyright law incentivizes destruction over preservation, what copyright reforms would better serve the public interest while protecting authors?
- Aug 20
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I want copyright to get enforced against these corporations, because then they would have a reason to use their considerable lobbying power to change copyright law, hopefully in a way that benefits everyone (including things like an open digital library).
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It is also difficult to see what the legal basis would be for allowing people to read books if Amazon's use isn't fair. If I read a textbook and come up with an algorithm based on it that gets used at scale, is that supposed to be a copyright violation?The basic point of a book is for people to (a) read it and (b) synthesise it into a…
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> Everyone is impressively short sighted. Incredibly. Even if we throw ethics aside and look at the strategy it is still myopic. The idea is destroy so others can't get the data too. But this assumes you've done a perfect scan and you have backups. There's no good reason to destroy the books other than myopia.I'm more than willing to bet that in…
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I wonder how much of AI is about owning all knowledge, deskilling the masses, reducing access, etc.? The end goal might be actual legit surfdom. Without the means to elevate the people's knowledge (and the companies have already stated they Benevolently Protect Users From Harmful Data™), it quickly becomes a situation where they control all…
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Well, this is what happens when they weren't allowed to use digital only copies, as they now have much more of an ability to get around copyright with physical items. The right thing would've been to allow digital items to also have the first sale doctrine, but we don't, so AI training companies must resort to destroying physical books in the…
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"And now everything is stale and the same."AI content is not exactly helping everything feeling like Extruded Product.
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I remember reading a scene where this exact thing was going on in Vernor Vinge's Rainbow's End: there, the books were being shredded and scanned as tiny bits and stitched together in software similar to shotgun genome sequencing.At any rate, I ought to pick it up again and finish reading it...
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> Paper is a superior storage medium to any hard-drive any day. We're recovering words from paper from over a thousand years agoMost 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…
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It's not necessarily doctrinally that crazy in copyright law. Some courts have considered AI training on copyrighted works a "transformative" use (traditionally more protected in fair use analysis), while providing human beings access to the works a "consumptive" use (traditionally less protected).There's also a fair use consideration that favors…
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Everyone turning into Metallica.The whole "copyright infringement is theft" meme seems to have stuck.20 years ago it was all "information wants to be free" and "infringement is not theft; being deprived of speculative profit is not a loss."How the turn tables.
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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…
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i dont get it.this is a complicated way of counting how many of each word is in the book.clearly fair use.does the author think cutting up a book is a copyright concern? theyre buying the books, its up to them what to do with their copy. if you want the books preserved, maybe fund your libraries to get a copy or two?
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The 404 Media report referenced in the article was submitted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49330742“We Tracked a Shipment of Rare Books. It Ended at an Amazon AI Training Facility” (404media.co)164 points | 3 days ago | 321 comments
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Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.
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Original full title (too long): It is a sign of the times that Amazon gets to call this fair use while huge corporations try to sue the Internet Archive out of business.