[HN Gopher] The Tragedy of Google Books (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
The Tragedy of Google Books (2017)
Author : lispybanana
Score : 461 points
Date : 2024-10-22 18:11 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theatlantic.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theatlantic.com)
| pvg wrote:
| https://archive.is/rQ7Zb
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| Thanks Paul!
| pvg wrote:
| Wrong number, I'm afraid.
| montag wrote:
| Thanks Peter
| Evidlo wrote:
| Thanks Mary
| senkora wrote:
| I'm sure the lawyers will eventually figure out a way to train an
| LLM on them.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| They probably already have! It seems like an amazing training
| dataset even if you can't share source data.
| amelius wrote:
| How do you train an LLM such that it is guaranteed to never
| regurgitate its training data?
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| You punish it if parts of the answer can be found in its
| training data, and reward it otherwise.
| amelius wrote:
| But the whole point of the training is that you reward it
| if it correctly reproduces the next token.
| zeroxfe wrote:
| That's not the whole point of the training. It's just
| (very loosely) a measure of loss used during pre-
| training. There are many post-training and alignment
| stages in a typical model that are designed to reward
| high-quality responses.
|
| Technically, yes, it's impossible to guarantee that it
| won't just regurgitate source material (which is mostly
| around the tails of the data distribution), but the whole
| point of training is to build generalized intelligence.
| amelius wrote:
| I guess I used the wrong wording but it doesn't change
| the argument. Yes, the whole point of training is to
| build generalized intelligence (or at least that's what
| we __hope__ for). But as far as I understand, we do it
| __mainly__ by training for the next word in the sequence.
|
| PS: you speak of "pre-training" and "post-training", so
| I'm curious what you think is the main part of the
| training (?)
| thayne wrote:
| IMO if a work is out of print (or equivalent depending on the
| medium) for more than a few years, it should be released into the
| public domain. Or maybe something like the public domain, but
| requires attribution.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Then every book will be immediately out of print after its
| initial run, while the not-quite-a-cartel of publishers all
| decline to print it until it hits the point where they no
| longer have to pay the author.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Then the publisher loses out on exclusive publishing rights
| and also loses money. It's in their interests to keep it _in_
| print so long as it 's a profitable book, even if they have
| to pay some percentage to the author. Once it goes into
| public domain every publisher can reprint it and the original
| publisher has to compete with them on price.
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| ok
| jamiek88 wrote:
| > so long as it's a profitable book
|
| And here is the rub. You'll end up with three or four super
| authors with the rest being ripped off.
|
| Much better for it to revert to the author in that
| situation IMO.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I'm not arguing for it (or against it for that matter), I
| was just pointing out that the analysis in the comment I
| responded to didn't make sense. _Every_ book won 't be
| allowed to fall out of print and copyright just to
| exploit the authors because it would also hurt the
| publishers, they also benefit from exclusive publishing
| rights. Publishing rights are granted by the copyright
| holder (the author) to the publisher, much like patent
| licenses.
|
| Regarding unprofitable books, they'll fall out of print
| anyways because they're unprofitable. Those authors won't
| be getting ripped off because they won't be making money
| either way beyond initial commissions and what few sales
| they get.
|
| > Much better for it to revert to the author in that
| situation IMO.
|
| The publisher doesn't hold the copyright, the author
| does, so copyright (the particular right under
| discussion) can't revert to the author as it never left
| the author. What the publisher holds is publishing rights
| per a contract with the author. That could revert back to
| the author (or be voided or however it's structured), and
| that would be reasonable but we don't need any laws for
| it, that would fall under normal contract terms. Whether
| it's a common thing now or feasible for a particular
| author (with no clout? maybe not, with billions in sales
| from prior books? probably) is another matter.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Part of the problem here is a change in tax law a couple of
| decades back where the backlist as a bunch of printed books
| in a warehouse became a tax liability when Congress tried
| to close a tax loophole which non-publishers were
| exploiting.
|
| Rather than the old model of printing a reasonable print
| run, selling books as demand allowed, and keeping unsold
| books in warehouses only paying tax as they were sold, the
| new laws required paying tax on inventory each year --- so
| any books not sold in the first year were not as
| profitable, hence book remaindering, and the current mess.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Do we really need publishers anymore?
| bloak wrote:
| They are useful for quality control when the author is not
| well known.
| ghaff wrote:
| As someone who has both independently published and gone
| through a technical publisher, there's still a stamp of
| approval, fully deserved or not, associated with your
| book being published by a known name.
| kps wrote:
| Like trademark: Use it or lose it.
|
| (The reality is that publishers would put lazy photocopies up
| for sale at ten zillion dollars a piece.)
| pfdietz wrote:
| So, e-books are either immediately out of print, or never out
| of print?
| tightbookkeeper wrote:
| What if we applied the simple test that the book was
| originally published on paper and no other printings have
| occurred (digital or paper).
| pessimizer wrote:
| Never out of print. If there's an e-copy available to buy,
| that's better than millions of other books.
| thayne wrote:
| By "in print" I mean, the publisher is actively selling it.
|
| Although, if I were writing the law I would require selling
| DRM free ebooks for ebooks to count for maintaining the
| copyright.
| eschneider wrote:
| Have you dealt with publishers? If a work is out of print for a
| few years, much better to have rights revert to the creator.
| WillAdams wrote:
| Even that doesn't always work --- I was rebuffed by Joan
| Turville-Petre's son when I asked for a license to reprint
| his mother's notes on J.R.R. Tolkien's translation of _The
| Old English Exodus_ on the grounds that he would prefer to
| work with an academic, rather than an individual.
|
| Anyone know an academic specializing in Old English who would
| like to oversee this reprinting? I have a typeset PDF which
| only wants proofreading and updating of the index.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Public Domain Review?
| andrewstuart wrote:
| Google must be tempted to put them in an LLM.
| bborud wrote:
| It would surprise me greatly if they haven't already.
| johnobrien1010 wrote:
| Another reason that they should never have been allowed to
| ingest all the books in the first place. Without paying for
| the rights to use the digital form of the book, a use which
| is explicitly prohibited by the publisher, they digitized the
| books anyway. If they used it to train an LLM, and the LLM
| regurgitates near facsimiles of all the copyrighted works
| without compensation to the original rights holders, that
| seems like something that should be illegal.
| anoncow wrote:
| Sad and criminal.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| The tragedy is that Google is tasked with this at all. It would
| be cool if public libraries could work together on a massive
| _public_ digital library. This shouldn 't be Google's
| responsibility.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Google wasn't tasked (by a third party) with this, they chose
| to do it.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| arguably Google was invented to fund this project.
|
| The books project predates the search engine and the search
| engine grew out of the project of creating a universal
| digital library. The PageRank algorithm is one of a class of
| algorithms used to score citations in books and papers.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| All humans everywhere have a responsibility to preserve culture
| and knowledge to the best of their ability. I think what you
| meant to say is that none of us can _trust_ Google with this
| important task.
| renewiltord wrote:
| One of the great tragedies of civilization is that we leave
| things in the hands of those who do them rather than in the
| hands of those who tell us about our responsibility to do
| them.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| I personally do what I can. I've been trying to find old
| phone books and catalogs at garage sales, scanning them
| when I can get them. I teach my children that this is a
| responsibility of theirs.
|
| But if you're offering me even a fraction of Google's
| budget, I think I might manage to scale things up.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Perhaps a second tragedy is that we give money to those
| who provide us with something. A better world might be
| where we give Google's money to people so that they can
| teach children to buy phone books at garage sales. In
| this way, civilization may prosper.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| A simple search for "phone books" on Google Books yields
| no actual phone books, so the poster is objectively doing
| a better job than Google on that front.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| HathiTrust was ... nearly this.
|
| Until it too was emasculated.
|
| <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HathiTrust>
|
| Otherwise, we have Project Gutenberg (public domain),
| OpenLibrary (Internet Archive, both PD and copyrighted works),
| ZLibrary, Library Genesis, and Anna's Archive.
| xipho wrote:
| A huge proportion of this corpus is found in the Hathi Trust (see
| https://www.hathitrust.org/the-collection/). We have had a grant
| to crawl and derive an index on it via their supercomputing
| resources. I'm sure they are looking to LLM proposals, though
| they are exceedingly careful about the copyright issues.
|
| https://www.hathitrust.org/
| fredgrott wrote:
| thank you as some of us were looking for something to replace
| the archive.org digital book library part....
| jsemrau wrote:
| >I'm sure they are looking to LLM proposals
|
| Well, it is a use case for this challenge
| https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/gemini-long-context
| philipkglass wrote:
| These Google scans are also available in the HathiTrust [1], an
| organization built from the big academic libraries that
| participated in early book digitization efforts. The HathiTrust
| is better about letting the public read books that have actually
| fallen into the public domain. I have found many books that are
| "snippet view" only on Google Books but freely visible on
| HathiTrust.
|
| If you are a student or researcher at one of the participating
| HathiTrust institutions, you can also get access to scans of
| books that are still in copyright.
|
| The one advantage Google Books still has is that its search tools
| are much faster and sometimes better, so it can be useful to
| search for phrases or topics on Google Books and then jump over
| to HathiTrust to read specific books surfaced by the search.
|
| [1] https://www.hathitrust.org/
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Hathitrust has been absolutely transformative for me, as an
| amateur nuclear enterprise historian.
| germinalphrase wrote:
| "...nuclear enterprise..."
|
| As in, the business of running a nuclear energy plant?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Yes. Electricity, propulsion, desalination, space heating,
| etc.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| The old Lia pocket warmer?
| acidburnNSA wrote:
| Yes!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| HathiTrust is a fine example of a repository which is in theory
| useful but in practice all but useless.
|
| Participation is limited to tertiary academic institutions, and
| possibly only four-year (rather than two-year) ones. This
| excludes local (city/county) libraries, as well as
| primary/secondary (grammar / middle / high school in the US)
| libraries.
|
| _Even public-domain records cannot be downloaded in whole_ ,
| but rather can be saved _one page at a time_ as PDFs. I 'm
| pretty sure that those interested in more useful archival will
| and/or have created automated tools to do so, but HathiTrust
| remains the most notable point-of-access for such works, and
| the additional generation of conversion and republication
| further degrades the quality of original-publication formats.
| (It's less a problem for regenerated works from OCR'd or
| manually-converted documents, but those of course lose _all_
| the characteristics of original publication.)
|
| And of course, _many materials still under copyright_ are not
| accessible to the general public at all, no matter how obscure.
| I 'd run into a case of this some months back trying to get a
| date attribution of an Alan Watts lecture which had been posted
| to HN:
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41231047> (thread).
|
| And my request still stands. Anyone with an academic
| affiliation who can check
| <https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000678503> and see how
| it relates to this post
| (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230841>) would have my
| gratitude.
| bgoated01 wrote:
| I just put in a request at my university library for that
| item. I'll let you know what it turns up.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| Eisenstein wrote:
| You might want to look for:
|
| Watts, Alan. Myth and Religion : the Edited Transcripts.
| First edition. Boston: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1996.
|
| It contains "Jesus - His Religion, Or the Religion About
| Him", which appears to be a very slightly different title
| from the work that you are searching for.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'd found that text at the time as noted here:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41235652>.
|
| The text includes the transcripts, but doesn't include the
| original date(s) of delivery / publication. And it's
| published a quarter century after the initial records of
| the lecture.
|
| As noted, I'd emailed the Alan Watts institute but have
| received no reply.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| Even with institutional login, HathiTrust does not show the
| full text online for this journal. It only permits searching
| and then showing the page numbers of the matches, which can
| be done without logging in.
|
| But I think this journal does not contain the date.
|
| Searching for "his religion" (with quotation marks) in volume
| 6 via HathiTrust shows a single match on page 11. Searching
| for the same text via the Google Books link from your other
| post shows the following entry among a list of what I assume
| are lectures:
|
| > 919 Jesus: His Religion, Or The Religion About Him ...
| 10.00 7.00
|
| The first number is some kind of index or serial number. The
| second number is the cassette cost and the third is the reel
| cost. You can see the column headings by searching for the
| number 900.
|
| Searching for "Watts" in the same book via Google Books shows
| the title of page 11, "New Alan Watts Lectures".
|
| Searching for the year numbers, the matches on that page seem
| to be for some text about the indexing of works in MMRI-1970,
| 1971 and 1972, rather than a publication year.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thanks for checking.
|
| And for confirming that HT is even more useless than I'd
| thought.
|
| Again: Fuck copyright.
| consf wrote:
| Google Books does have the edge when it comes to search
| functionality
| Zigurd wrote:
| O'Reilly, for whom I've been a lead author and co-author, did
| this: https://www.oreilly.com/pub/pr/1042
|
| They call it Founder's Copyright. The also use Creative Commons.
| The goal is to make out of print books available at no cost.
| card_zero wrote:
| > A complete list of available titles is at
| www.oreilly.com/openbook
|
| Exciting!
|
| _Follows link_
|
| _Link no longer exists, gets O 'Reilly front page instead_
|
| "Introducing the AI Academy, Help your entire org put GenAI to
| work"
|
| Thanks O'Reilly.
| MollyRealized wrote:
| It's okay, I'll just check the Wayb-- _shit_
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Wayback Machine has been working for the past few days,
| look: https://web.archive.org/web/20240607220047/http://www
| .oreill...
| Zigurd wrote:
| It looks like the pdfs of at least some of the books are
| there. But it's a pretty small subset of their out of
| print books.
| ToucanLoucan wrote:
| The original dream of the internet: Information, freely
| available to any who want it.
|
| The new dream of the internet: Some information, that aligns
| with the values of our advertisers, delivered via an LLM that
| sometimes makes shit up.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| Yeah, each year we inch closer to an internet where the
| only things to do revolve around buying things; watch
| "content" which mostly revolves around creators shilling
| products, research products, or buy products. Every hobby
| has to be monetized now, everything has to be a side
| hustle, every impression monetized. Few seem to bother
| anymore with personal blogs that exist for their own
| enjoyment and sharing of knowledge, and yet with all this
| paid creation, full-time artists struggle more than ever,
| largely unable to afford living costs in the very cities
| they helped to build the culture and value of.
|
| I find it personally difficult to look at the entirety of
| the internet in 2024 and say that it's definitely better
| for society than it was in 2004. I guess now at least we
| can mostly book appointments on our phones without having
| to speak with someone in real-time as they read dates and
| times off of a calendar interface that we can now just use
| ourselves directly.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| There's nothing wrong with people trying to make money on
| the internet. You can sit in your bubble of personal
| dislikes and preferences, whining about average people
| using a very accessible tool to try to make a living for
| themselves, just like you presumably do in some way or
| another, but why not instead see the bigger picture of an
| internet in which not all things are shit and not all
| commercialization is automatically bad.
|
| Personal blogs, creative efforts and wonderful resources
| still abound on the internet and can still usually be
| found quite easily if you put a bit of effort into
| looking.
| hotspot_one wrote:
| and where the information you are looking for is plastered
| with ads.
|
| yes I know adblocker, pihole, etc.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| Whose dream? It's specifically here on HN that I find the
| largest number of comments bitching about the uselessness
| of the internet and how they replaced their own search
| efforts with just asking a hallucinating LLM, as if they
| had no choice in the matter. Great way to help make things
| better friends....
|
| If anything the internet today is more loaded than ever
| with cool information and useful stuff, especially as ever
| larger bodies of formerly analog content get digitized and
| often with full open access. If one can get over their
| myopic naval gazing and cultivation of fetishism about
| everything having gone to shit, it's not even hard to find
| most of that useful information.
|
| The internet -like any complex thing with multiple
| interests involved in its existence and operation- is just
| whatever works best for different people in different
| contexts, commercially, personally, technically and so
| forth. It's neither an ideal that one should obsess over or
| something to be neatly pigeonholed into a box of how it
| "should be". Adapt, use its tools to make whatever parts of
| it you can fit whatever your personal ideal is, instead of
| endlessly blaming advertisers or people just trying to make
| a living from one more commercial landscape.
| stvltvs wrote:
| Looks like Openbook stuff is still there, just homeless. I
| had to do a web search to find it. For example:
|
| https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/make3/book/
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| Yes, I see it all with
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Aoreilly.com+inurl%3A
| o...
|
| So it seems like it mainly lost the overview page?
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| It looks as though they killed the page sometime between
| June 7th and June 26th, although the page on June 7th
| seem to try to redirect to "https://oreilly.janrainsso.co
| m/static/server.html?origin=htt...
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20240607220047/http://www.ore
| ill...
|
| Definitely perplexing, I can't find the reason to kill
| what appears like a simple HTML page unless they've
| killed the project entirely.
| tap-snap-or-nap wrote:
| Basically of no good now
| microtherion wrote:
| It's somewhat ironic that, while the individual books are still
| accessible, their index pages https://www.oreilly.com/free and
| https://www.oreilly.com/openbook both redirect to some AI
| propaganda these days, with no links to the books left.
|
| A third party page still has links to some (possibly all) of
| the books: https://zapier.com/blog/free-oreilly-press-books/
| Zigurd wrote:
| I could not find a listing of available downloads. Sent an
| email inquiring about this. Will report if I get anything
| enlightening back.
| svilen_dobrev wrote:
| This seems to be the fate of knowledge/content that stays in
| institutions which have been built with the idea of collecting it
| and growing it.. but have turned into walled gardens/crypts of
| sort. Rot/Rust and be forgotten.
|
| A very cynical and dark view is that the New things/people need
| that oblivion in order to feel great, for not haveing to compare
| with old great-er ones. Rewriting history as it seems fit the
| current powers-that-be, is easier this way.
|
| Or may be it's just collective stupidity? or societal immaturity
| ?
|
| (i am coming from completely different killed project on a
| different continent, but the idea is the same)
| kyleee wrote:
| I think you are on to something, people frequently don't want
| to grapple with and understand what has been done before, they
| prefer to just wing it and move forward on their own.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| I am fairly certain there is more knowledge/content available
| to anyone in this century than last century or any century
| before it. But perhaps I have misread your comment.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| I seriously doubt there's very much _highly relevant_ old
| knowledge locked away somewhere. Is there interesting stuff we
| don 't have good access to? Sure, but mainly of interest to
| historians (pro or amateur). You're not likely to find the cure
| for cancer written down in some 1000-year-old book somewhere.
| And while a few people might really be interested in reading
| decades or centuries-old novels that weren't popular enough to
| be called "classics" now, the vast majority of people aren't
| going to find such stories about people in the distant past all
| that interesting.
|
| Of course, it's best to preserve past knowledge, but I think
| the idea that this is part of some kind of conspiracy to keep
| people buying new stuff is pretty silly. People are always
| going to want new stuff, as society grows and changes.
| sersi wrote:
| > find the cure for cancer written down in some 1000-year-old
| book somewhere.
|
| While you're most likely right about the cure for cancer, I
| did want to note that this is kind of how the cure for
| malaria was found (artemisinin). Tu Youyou who won the nobel
| prize systematically investigated Traditional Chinese
| Medecine remedies until she came across one that was
| effective. That particular remedy was described in a 1600
| years old text The Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergency
| Treatments, written in 340 by Ge Hong.
|
| Note: before anyone think that the fact that a remedy
| described in traditional Chinese texts mean that TCM is
| reliable and a viable alternative in all text, she screened
| over 2,000 traditional Chinese recipes and made 380 herbal
| extracts, from some 200 herbs which were tested on mice. So,
| yes one of the remedy were successful but the success rate of
| TCM was not particularly high :)
| shiroiushi wrote:
| This is really interesting actually, but I do want to point
| out that I'm not saying all old knowledge is only of
| interest to historians: I was arguing against the idea that
| some old knowledge is "locked away" and not publicly
| available as part of some kind of conspiracy.
|
| Lots of old knowledge is readily available to the public.
| The complete works of Shakespeare are a good example here,
| as is Homer's epics The Odyssey and The Iliad. (I don't
| know if that TCM stuff is or not.) These kinds of things
| are considered "classics" and are frequently reproduced,
| now available online in countless places, etc. Obviously,
| lots of people besides historians think they're important,
| and so they're copied frequently and made available at
| large. As the famous rule goes, "99% of everything is
| crap", so probably all the best stuff from the past is
| well-preserved, and the rest, not so much. I seriously
| doubt that something as good as Shakespeare is locked away
| in someone's private library and virtually unknown to
| almost anyone.
|
| Of course, there's always exceptions and you never know
| when some overlooked tidbit of info from the distant past
| might be really useful, as you showed here, so I do think
| it's important to preserve and enable easy access to as
| many old works as possible.
| hotspot_one wrote:
| > I seriously doubt there's very much highly relevant old
| knowledge locked away somewhere.
|
| Interesting take on what "knowledge" means and what makes
| knowledge valuable.
|
| If I understand "knowledge" as "information directly relevant
| to a technical problem", then:
|
| - the knowledge which remains relevant to that problem will
| stay available to practitioners (i.e. the properties of a
| Gaussian distribution, from Gauss, 1809)
|
| - the knowledge which is no longer relevant to that problem
| will probably be lost (how to compute the integral of a
| Gaussian using a slide rule. Slide rules first developed
| circa 1620, last used circa 1970)
|
| In other words, yes, your point is profoundly true. Knowledge
| relevant to a specific task stays available, not relevant
| gets pruned quickly.
|
| My question would be if we want to use that definition of
| relevant and that understanding of what drives value. i.e.
| I'm not asking if you are correct, I've just shown that you
| are correct. My question is if the assumptions/values which
| make this correct are assumptions/values we are comfortable
| with. In other words, is is wise?
| shiroiushi wrote:
| It's not just technical knowledge either: look at
| Shakespeare's works. They're centuries old, but there's
| absolutely no danger of those disappearing. Lots of old
| stuff is well-preserved and highly duplicated for easy
| access.
| lanstin wrote:
| My video streaming data supports this idea even tho I rewatch
| all Star Trek series (except TOS).
| gosub100 wrote:
| The books project was very early in Google's history. Possibly
| before their IPO. Since then, they've shed their don't be evil
| motto and shitcanned the 20% time affordance for new projects.
|
| I think it's neatly summarized in two words: shareholder
| growth.
| Animats wrote:
| We need a Copyright Term Reduction Act.
|
| It's time. 50 years, renewal is possible but expensive.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| Even 50 is a lot, because it starts at the death of the author.
| Popular culture shouldn't remain locked out for generations. 50
| maximum would be ideal, two generations from the one who
| experienced it in the original cultural context.
| Animats wrote:
| 50 years from first publication. That's all the TRIPS
| agreement requires.[1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| And that's still a lot, since fifty years from publication
| is the _minimum_ to abide to TRIPS, but we 're used to much
| worse, so it doesn't sound as bad now. It could be shorter,
| things move a lot faster nowadays, a single generation of
| monopoly means more today than a hundred years ago.
| mjevans wrote:
| Just my opinion but as a starting point for the argument...
| * 20 years from date of first publish (renewable up to CAP? 50
| years) * Must remain available every year * 10 year
| renewal blocks with massive registration fee increases *
| Compulsory maximum license fee cap (can offer for less) in the
| laws
|
| Note this is not TRADE MARK; trade marks are _consumer
| protection_ related to 'brand ownership'.
| gosub100 wrote:
| And reign in the damages for infringement to some amount closer
| to what was actually lost. For instance, if someone has a
| million books on a drive they haven't deprived the publisher of
| a million sales for chrissakes
| js8 wrote:
| Google Books is a tragedy of the commons problem, created by
| copyright, which is supposedly a solution to the tragedy of the
| commons problem.
| ErikAugust wrote:
| "Page had always wanted to digitize books. Way back in 1996, the
| student project that eventually became Google--a "crawler" that
| would ingest documents and rank them for relevance against a
| user's query--was actually conceived as part of an effort "to
| develop the enabling technologies for a single, integrated and
| universal digital library." The idea was that in the future, once
| all books were digitized, you'd be able to map the citations
| among them, see which books got cited the most, and use that data
| to give better search results to library patrons. But books still
| lived mostly on paper. Page and his research partner, Sergey
| Brin, developed their popularity-contest-by-citation idea using
| pages from the World Wide Web."
|
| Larry Page had some cool ideas... can't imagine Books will ever
| be resurrected, unfortunately.
| dekhn wrote:
| He really wanted to digitize all of them to provide reference
| and training data for early language models (well before LLMs,
| transformers, etc).
|
| He also had a plan (with George Church) to build enormous
| warehouses holding large-scale biology research infrastructure
| right next to google data centers. Because most biology
| research is done at locations that have reached their limit on
| computational/storage capacity.
|
| Larry had many good ideas but he struggled to get the majority
| of them off the ground. For example, when Trump was president
| and invited all the major tech leaders, Larry came with a plan
| to upgrade the US electrical system with long-range DC.
| shiroiushi wrote:
| >Larry came with a plan to upgrade the US electrical system
| with long-range DC.
|
| I feel like some crucial detail is missing here. They already
| use HVDC for long-distance transmission lines, inside and
| outside of the US. Texas could benefit from it I suppose, but
| the US in general already uses it where appropriate AFAIK.
| pyrale wrote:
| > Larry had many good ideas but he struggled to get the
| majority of them off the ground. For example, when Trump was
| president and invited all the major tech leaders, Larry came
| with a plan to upgrade the US electrical system with long-
| range DC.
|
| I fail to see how that would be a good idea.
|
| To me, it looks like some magnate in a completely unrelated
| industry, who is megalomaniac enough to believe that they can
| enter a completely unrelated industry and explain to experts
| how things ought to get done.
| gosub100 wrote:
| He didn't originate the idea, it's well known that DC is
| more efficient but has other serious hurdles. It often
| takes innovative and influential people to break the status
| quo. E.g. Elon and EVs.
| pyrale wrote:
| > it's well known that DC is more efficient but has other
| serious hurdles.
|
| If it's well known but no one has done it, maybe there
| are reasons for it? Building long-distance lines is a
| very capital-intensive decision, and if the cost-benefit
| analysis was better, projects would be done. Looking by
| DOE's communication [1], we can see that the cost-benefit
| analysis doesn't look good now for a big network, but
| also that HVDC projects that actually make economic sense
| have been built for decades.
|
| Sure, sometimes innovative people make a big change, but
| what's the innovation there?
|
| [1]: https://www.energy.gov/oe/articles/connecting-
| country-hvdc
| gosub100 wrote:
| There absolutely are HVDC transmission lines under the
| sea. And capital intensive, revolutionary projects are
| ripe for disruption from people who have already pulled
| off similar feats, hence why it would make sense for a
| Google founder to take interest.
| pyrale wrote:
| > There absolutely are HVDC transmission lines under the
| sea.
|
| Not sure where you see me claiming the opposite?
|
| > And capital intensive, revolutionary projects are ripe
| for disruption from people who have already pulled off
| similar feats
|
| If Larry Page is looking to waste a few billions in
| cables, he's absolutely welcome to do it. One HVDC
| connection between France and the UK is private, for
| instance [1]. If he believes there's money to be made
| similarly in the US, he should go for it.
|
| That's not exactly the same offer as "Larry page has
| suggested the government should invest in expensive
| infrastructure for an industry he's never worked in".
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElecLink
| gosub100 wrote:
| > Not sure where you see me claiming the opposite
|
| Hmm, maybe the part where you said "but no one has done
| it"?
|
| What is the point of this level of degeneracy in
| conversation?
| tmtvl wrote:
| > _E.g. Elon and EVs._
|
| Man, Nissan just gets no love at all. They did the EV
| thing before Elon ran X into the ground (the bank, not
| the website formerly known as Twitter):
| https://www.motortrend.com/features/nissan-leaf-ev-
| history-p...
| gosub100 wrote:
| The claim wasn't "Elon made the first-ever, mass-
| produced, street-legal 0 emissions vehicle powered by
| electricity.
| dekhn wrote:
| His father was a computer scientist and his brother Carl is
| an electrical engineer; Carl has done extensive research in
| the area (and runs at least one company working on related
| problems) and Larry is highly educated about this stuff.
| He's not a megalomaniac- just completely unrealistic in how
| he pursues his goals.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > The idea was that in the future, once all books were
| digitized, you'd be able to map the citations among them, see
| which books got cited the most, and use that data to give
| better search results to library patrons.
|
| You can do something similar to this already, by mapping which
| books are cited in Wikipedia articles. If you know how to do
| such a thing, because I don't.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Not specific to Wikipedia:
|
| https://aarontay.medium.com/3-new-tools-to-try-for-
| literatur...
|
| https://archive.is/Ul13s
|
| Specific to Wikipedia:
|
| Wikipedia Citations: Reproducible Citation Extraction from
| Multilingual Wikipedia [2024]
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19291v1
|
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2406.19291
|
| > Wikipedia is an essential component of the open science
| ecosystem, yet it is poorly integrated with academic open
| science initiatives. Wikipedia Citations is a project that
| focuses on extracting and releasing comprehensive datasets of
| citations from Wikipedia. A total of 29.3 million citations
| were extracted from English Wikipedia in May 2020. Following
| this one-off research project, we designed a reproducible
| pipeline that can process any given Wikipedia dump in the
| cloud-based settings. To demonstrate its usability, we
| extracted 40.6 million citations in February 2023 and 44.7
| million citations in February 2024. Furthermore, we equipped
| the pipeline with an adapted Wikipedia citation template
| translation module to process multilingual Wikipedia articles
| in 15 European languages so that they are parsed and mapped
| into a generic structured citation template. This paper
| presents our open-source software pipeline to retrieve,
| classify, and disambiguate citations on demand from a given
| Wikipedia dump.
|
| Prior work referenced in above abstract with some team
| overlap:
|
| Wikipedia citations: A comprehensive data set of citations
| with identifiers extracted from English Wikipedia [2021]
|
| https://direct.mit.edu/qss/article/2/1/1/97565/Wikipedia-
| cit...
|
| https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00105
|
| Datasets:
|
| A Comprehensive Dataset of Classified Citations with
| Identifiers from English Wikipedia (2024)
|
| https://zenodo.org/records/10782978
|
| https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10782978
|
| A Comprehensive Dataset of Classified Citations with
| Identifiers from Multilingual Wikipedia (2024)
|
| https://zenodo.org/records/11210434
|
| https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11210434
|
| Code (MIT License):
|
| https://github.com/albatros13/wikicite
|
| https://github.com/albatros13/wikicite/tree/multilang
|
| Bonus links:
|
| https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Alternative_parsers
|
| https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2022/11/01/guest-post-
| wi...
| lqstuart wrote:
| ...and then they sold out to a Wall Street dickhead, and here
| we are
| submeta wrote:
| With library genesis, who needs Google Books anymore? I buy books
| physically to support the author/s and download an epub version
| from said site to my kindle. The physical books I hardly read,
| they are for my shelf. Although I love the feeling of printed
| books, but I read in bed, and it's easier to hold an ebook. Also
| I read when I commute. It's lighter to have my Kindle Oasis with
| me with tons of books on it.
| ghaff wrote:
| There's the everything available online for free mindset. But,
| yes, I've basically donated all my books that were in the
| public domain. And, in general, have been massively purging my
| book collection of stuff I won't realistically read again.
| submeta wrote:
| I do buy books, to support the authors. And I would encourage
| anyone to support the authors they like to read.
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| I agree, but also wouldn't lose sleep for pirating a book
| of an author that died more than 20 years ago, in most
| contexts.
| kccqzy wrote:
| Someone needs to scan the book and upload it to library
| genesis. The article said Google had developed this massively
| efficient apparatus for scanning (or taking photographs of)
| books, and most of the article was about out-of-print books.
|
| I personally have actually tried to contribute to libgen a
| particular difficult-to-find-online book by buying it, scanning
| it, and uploading it. There need to be more people doing this.
| SauntSolaire wrote:
| Did you use a scanning service or do it yourself?
| kccqzy wrote:
| I did it myself. A few hours for 500 pages. Surprisingly
| soothing.
| layer8 wrote:
| Many books aren't on libgen. It's been rather hit and miss for
| me.
| consf wrote:
| Some newer releases or niche books might not be available at
| all
| hotspot_one wrote:
| how sure are you that library genesis will remain available?
| submeta wrote:
| Well, we got a large number of mirrors. Just like scientific
| hub. But to be honest: We cannot be sure. That's why I have
| my physical books as well ;)
| consf wrote:
| Supporting authors by buying physical books while enjoying the
| convenience of eBooks is a smart approach
| yonran wrote:
| > Dan Clancy, the Google engineering lead on the project who
| helped design the settlement, thinks that it was a particular
| brand of objector--not Google's competitors but "sympathetic
| entities" you'd think would be in favor of it, like library
| enthusiasts, academic authors, and so on--that ultimately flipped
| the DOJ.
|
| I was at Google in 2009 on a team adjacent to Dan Clancy when he
| was most excited about the Authors' Guild negotiations to publish
| orphan works and create a portal to pay copyright holders who
| signed up, and I recall that one opponent that he was frustrated
| at was Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive, who filed a
| jealous amicus brief
| (https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-yo...)
| complaining that the Authors' Guild settlement would not grant
| him access to publishing orphan works too. In my opinion Kahle
| was wrong; the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would
| have encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead
| of doing nothing which is what actually happened in the 15 year
| since then. Instead of one company selling out-of-print but in-
| copyright books, or multiple organizations, no one is allowed to
| sell them today.
|
| Since then, of course, Brewster Kahle launched an e-library of
| copyrighted books without legal authorization anyway which will
| probably be the death of the current organization that runs the
| Internet Archive. Tragic all around.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| That pandemic library was a huge, obvious over step by him.
|
| It will have consequences far beyond the immediate lawsuit too.
|
| The very concept has basically been iced for a generation and
| the net is only getting more locked down not less.
| jmb99 wrote:
| Fortunately (by some definition of fortunately), most
| countries don't agree on exactly how the web should be
| "locked down." This benefits at least some people (like me)
| who live in countries who make also no effort to restrict
| what can be shoved down the internet tube, including from
| countries that don't particularly care about western
| copyright law. Would it be nice to have a fully sanctioned
| pandemic library-style service? Absolutely. But I have never
| once looked for a textbook, paper, regular book, etc online
| and not found a copy for free. Usually takes the same amount
| of time or less compared to finding a copy on Amazon (if it's
| currently in print), and almost always less time using my
| library's clunky online ebook platform[1].
|
| Is that legal? Technically yes, in my country. Is it ethical?
| Debatable, depending on who you're asking. But for me
| personally, I have found it to be getting substantially
| easier to find high quality copies of copyrighted _anything_
| in the past 3-5 years compared to 10-15 years ago, so I don't
| necessarily agree with the blanket statement that "the net is
| only getting more locked down."
|
| [1] I like to use the library as much as possible, if for
| nothing else than to increase usage numbers to marginally
| positively decrease the likelihood of finding cuts.
| notpushkin wrote:
| > Would it be nice to have a fully sanctioned pandemic
| library-style service? Absolutely.
|
| This is basically LibGen / Anna's Archive. A bit clunky
| around the download process (maybe things get better if you
| get a paid subscription though!), but overall it works
| pretty well.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| >This is basically LibGen / Anna's Archive. A bit clunky
| around the download process
|
| Not at all. You visit libgen, search for your book, find
| it (usually available) click one of the two available
| links for it, click to download, have it download. Done.
|
| It couldn't be easier.
| mastazi wrote:
| This is an insightful comment and I thank you for sharing it
| but, after having looked at the brief you linked
|
| > a jealous amicus brief that the Authors' Guild settlement
| would not grant him access to publishing orphan works too
|
| that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are good
| points there about the process of notifying orphan works rights
| holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position. I do
| agree with you on this part though
|
| > the existence of one orphan works clearinghouse would have
| encouraged Congress to grant more libraries access instead of
| doing nothing
|
| Edit: I also agree with you that the way the IA subsequently
| created its e-library was not ideal.
| lokar wrote:
| I would say it's much worse then "not ideal", they may have
| poisoned the well for decades to come.
| adastra22 wrote:
| Maybe permanently, as societal stances on these sorts of
| issues tend to solidify over time. In a couple of
| generations the very idea of a library may be confined to
| history thanks to IA :(
| sulam wrote:
| That is far-fetched, science fabulist style thinking. The
| average person on the street does not know about Brewster
| or the IA, but they certainly do know about their local
| library and would object if it was to disappear.
| immibis wrote:
| I expect the average person has never visited a library
| since school
| rdmond wrote:
| In fact, in the US, around half the population goes to a
| library at least once a year
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2016/09/09/libraries
| -20... https://www.ala.org/news/2019/12/new-ala-report-
| gen-z-millen...
| greentxt wrote:
| "with a majority reporting that libraries ... play at
| least some role in helping them decide what information
| they can trust."
|
| Sounds legit
| tehjoker wrote:
| why are you blaming IA for the aggressive and tight
| fisted behavior of publishers?
| yonran wrote:
| > that's not a fair overview of the amicus brief, there are
| good points there about the process of notifying orphan works
| rights holders and about the risk of a monopolistic position
|
| What I meant by "jealous" is that the Internet Archive's
| interest was not to improve author notification or to protect
| foreign authors; it was to provide a competing service under
| similar or better terms than Google was able to negotiate
| without spending the time and money that Google did
| litigating. Kahle wanted what was in Google's settlement.
|
| And what I meant by "Kahle was wrong" is not that every
| argument that his lawyers thought up was false; I think the
| agreement was later amended to fix some issues. My point is
| that Kahle's theory of change was wrong. He thought that when
| the settlement was rejected, then Google would push Congress
| to create an orphan works law which the Internet Archive
| could use to publish old books too. As he wrote in his op-ed,
| "We need to focus on legislation to address works that are
| caught in copyright limbo. ... We are very close to having
| universal access to all knowledge. Let's not stumble now."
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
| dyn/content/article/2009/0... As it turns out, the rejection
| of the class action settlement did not cause Congress to
| create an orphan works law. In retrospect, we would have been
| more likely to get an orphan works law if Google had been
| allowed to set up a proof of the concept, making the monopoly
| on orphan works temporary.
| cxr wrote:
| There's such a weird tone to your posts. It's as if they're
| meant to give the impression that Kahle had a substantial,
| if not singlehanded, influence over the outcome. In
| reality, his input probably didn't have even the impact
| that Kahle himself hoped for and the appropriate adjective
| to describe the effect is probably "negligible", if at all.
| It was a class action lawsuit with extremely dubious
| underpinnings where over 6,000 people wrote in to ask that
| they _not_ be considered part of the class.
| pastage wrote:
| I think the biggest hurdle was lawyers from the big
| publishing houses, the only view I heard was "This deal
| will make Google to powerful", the deal would have had far
| reaching international effects. In the end we know that
| Creative Commons was wrong you can not fix copyright by
| playing along.
| chambers wrote:
| I wish the contradiction you spotted was clear on their
| Wikipedia page. It demonstrates how far back IA's management
| troubles go, and how their clean image was maybe just an image.
|
| For me, I became concerned when they fibbed about why the
| Internet Archive Credit Union was liquidated. IA alleged it was
| shut down due to onerous regulations, but the government said
| IA actually never lived up to their goal of allowing local,
| low-income folk to sign-up for their service.
| https://ncua.gov/newsroom/press-release/2016/internet-archiv...
| pessimizer wrote:
| Thanks for making me aware of this. This guy's heart is clearly
| (to me) in the right place, but his understanding of power is
| seriously lacking. That's probably what gave him the hubris to
| create Wayback and IA, but he'll be absolutely dumbstruck when
| they shut it down.
| kragen wrote:
| He won't be surprised at all. His slogan is "governments burn
| libraries". He's been able to forestall that for a while, and
| even provide public access, but permanence of the IA as an
| institution was never in the cards, given its subversive
| goal: universal access to all human knowledge.
|
| Guess where the first backup copy of the Internet Archive is
| located.
| Yeul wrote:
| Libraries are funded by the government. They've been
| diligently scanning books for decades but nobody has had
| even the slightest interest in that until their favourite
| hackerman showed up. Libertarian god complex is so
| tiresome.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _Some_ libraries are government-funded. Many are not.
|
| That ranges from the personal book collection numbering
| from one to many thousands in private hands, private
| institutional libraries (the Mechanics Institute in San
| Francisco is one that comes to mind, many private
| universities and grammar schools have their own, as do
| numerous corporations, some of which are catalogued by
| Worldcat).
|
| Preservation of Western culture, notably the Greek and
| Roman canons, as well as much literature and knowledge of
| the Jewish, Byzantine, and Islamic worlds, occurred
| through religious institutions. Though in some regards
| those were the governments of the time. Indian, Chinese,
| and other further East Asian collections were preserved
| through multiple means.
|
| Book digitisation at US academic institutions (the
| University of Michigan being a major contributor to both
| Google Books and HathiTrust) has had its own exctremely
| combative relationship with commercial publishers, as has
| the US Library of Congress, which issues US copyright in
| the first place.
|
| Avoid slurs, it's an HN guideline:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html>.
| kragen wrote:
| Most libraries are not funded by a government. Your
| comment is not up to acceptable quality or civility
| standards and should not have been posted.
| the_af wrote:
| The Wayback machine is such an invaluable tool.
|
| I've used it to track down when wording on a site (for
| someday relevant to my job) changed, for example.
| nanna wrote:
| I imagine there would be enough institutional support for
| the Way Back Machine from the likes of Wikipedia at least
| that even if the IA did go down the WBM would be carved off
| and kept alive. Effectively I think the IA will be broken
| up.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > In my opinion Kahle was wrong; the existence of one orphan
| works clearinghouse would have encouraged Congress to grant
| more libraries access instead of doing nothing
|
| Maybe. I think that is a pretty optimistic view of congress and
| our political process. I would argue that having a powerful,
| rich company with a monopoly to lose would have made passing
| such a law less likely, not more.
|
| I do think we would have been better off with a Google monopoly
| on unpublished unclaimed books than with the lack of access we
| have today.
|
| The article says:
|
| > You'd get in a lot of trouble, they said, but all you'd have
| to do, more or less, is write a single database query. You'd
| flip some access control bits from off to on. It might take a
| few minutes for the command to propagate.
|
| If it's so easy, I'm suprised nobody has done it and accepted
| the consequences. It seems one of the largest single positive
| impacts any person could make on the world. Once it's released,
| it'll never go back in the box. A modern Pandora.
| sulam wrote:
| In practice that is an obvious exaggeration for the purposes
| of making a point. It is probably simple enough to make the
| change, and it's equally easy to change it back. One
| configuration makes you subject to massive lawsuits and the
| other doesn't.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| How would a settlement with the Authors' Guild cover orphan
| works? If the Authors' Guild is in a position to grant a
| license, _then it 's not an orphan work_. The whole orphan
| works problem is that for a lot of valueless works, _nobody
| knows who owns what_.
| vintermann wrote:
| The situation with IA is one thing, but the general negative
| attitude of libraries and archives to public access is
| something I've observed too, and it's depressing.
|
| For instance, they can spend a lot of effort digitizing an
| archive they got from a business active from 1890 to 1970 - and
| then put it all in a single collection, which the public won't
| get access to until 2070. There's no reason to think the
| business handled sensitive personal information, but it's too
| much work to check, so they assume it did. They could classify
| individual documents according to whether they were actually
| from before 1920, but that's too much work too.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's the case with so much of this sort of thing. You also
| see it in cases like open sourcing proprietary software. You
| need to pay someone competent to do a thorough audit or you
| end up with headlines about so and so releasing PII or
| otherwise confidential information.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I think it could be a great charity btw. Get donations from
| public, talk companies into releasing their old software,
| hire auditors for them and maybe developers to get the
| result running without all the proprietary third-party
| components.
| ghaff wrote:
| Personally I'd rather see maintainers getting better
| compensated for creating new and widely useful software
| in cases where they don't have a corporate sponsor. Most
| abandoned proprietary software is just old.
| notpushkin wrote:
| I'd love that too, of course. But some old things are
| great for their historical value - personally, I would be
| thrilled to see Winamp released properly, for example.
| acdha wrote:
| One thing to keep in mind is that libraries and archives have
| been budget starved for decades. You can often get a grant to
| acquire or digitize something but fewer donors are interested
| in paying lawyers to evaluate copyright exposure, which leads
| to conservative policies.
|
| All of the actual librarians and archivists I know hate this
| situation - it's not a job you take if you don't want people
| to access things - but that tends to translate into requests
| for copyright exemptions.
|
| A really big one is orphan works where they have things like
| digitized music which can't even be linked to a known
| copyright holder because it's unclear who owns it after
| decades of contract shuffles and acquisitions, where you
| could potentially solve the problem by changing copyright law
| to require periodic payments to maintain protected status so
| someone at, say, Sony would have to cut a check every year to
| say that they still want to protect some obscure old blues
| track from 1952 which they don't even offer for sale any
| more. I especially liked the proposals linking that to
| availability for mainstream sale: say that there's no charge
| for anything which is normally available on iTunes, Play,
| Amazon, etc. but you need to pay a fee for works which aren't
| available.
| steeeeeve wrote:
| There was a lot of public debate about this at the time.
| Kahle's argument made sense.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| I worked at the Library of Congress on their Digital Preservation
| Project, circa 2001-2003. The stated goal was to "digitize all of
| the Library's collections" and while most people think of books,
| I was in the Motion Picture Broadcast and Recorded Sound
| Division.
|
| In our collection were Thomas Edison's first motion pictures,
| wire spool recordings from reporters at D-Day, and LPs of some of
| the greatest musicians of all time. And that was just our
| Division. Others - like American Heritage - had photos from the
| US Civil War and more.
|
| Anyway, while the Rights information is one big, ugly tangled
| web, the other side is the hardware to read the formats. Much of
| the media is fragile and/or dangerous to use so you have to be
| exceptionally careful. Then you have to document all the settings
| you used because imagine that three months from now, you learn
| some filter you used was wrong or the hardware was
| misconfigured.. you need to go back and understand what was
| affected how.
|
| Cool space. I wish I'd worked there longer.
| caseysoftware wrote:
| Also.. it was fun learning the answer to "what is the work?"
|
| If you have an LP or wire spool recording, the audio is the
| key, obvious work. But then you have the album cover, the spool
| case, and the physical condition of the media. Being able to
| see an album cover or read a reporter's notes/labeling is
| almost as important as the audio.
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Is the Library of Congress really beholden to copyright laws? I
| guess I assumed as the national deposit library they had a
| special exemption to copy any damn thing they pleased for
| archival purposes.
|
| If they don't have that prerogative, they probably should, and
| Congress should legislate that to be the case.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| The Library of Congress and its staff determine fair use
| exceptions in certain contexts so I'm not sure who could find
| fault with them, as they could simply authorize it before or
| after the fact, from what I understand.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| For Kagi users, I recommend putting books.google.com as a pinned
| domain. This way, you'll many times be presented with some of the
| best sources for any search query. Then it's a matter of finding
| the ePub file of that book. To read on MacOS, FBReader is a high
| quality app.
| emmelaich wrote:
| Thanks. Looks like it's available for Windows/Linux too. At
| last as of FBReader 2.1.2 30th September 2024.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| I never seen an explicit mention if the Google Books corpus was
| indeed or not used for training LLMs...
|
| Anyone knows more about it?
| boramalper wrote:
| Of course someone needs to scan/digitise those books but for
| those which already are, there is _Anna's Archive_.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive
| fx1994 wrote:
| it's a shame you have to pirate your way to find a book that is
| practically unavailable, but I support pirating old unavailable
| stuff
| einpoklum wrote:
| Written from a capitalist perspective, extolling "market forces"
| and legitimizing corporate and government limitations on copying.
|
| "between 1923 and 1963 ... copyrights back then had to be
| renewed, and often the rightsholder wouldn't bother filing the
| paperwork" - oh no, how terrible. How lucky we are that in these
| modern times one doesn't even have to file paperwork in order to
| prevent you from copying information.
|
| and they go on to suck to Google and decry how they didn't get to
| legitimize their control over a large swath of human knowledge
| and cultural heritage.
|
| "It certainly seems unlikely that someone is going to spend
| political capital--especially today--trying to change the
| licensing regime for books, let alone old ones." <- copyright
| regime, licensing regime - all of this stuff is illegitimate
| apriori. Poetry, literature, music, software, papers and books -
| we cannot and must not tolerate restrictions on their
| dissemination.
|
| What arrangements the commercial and governmental entities come
| to, our "arrangement" should be that everything gets disseminated
| widely and without restriction, so that curtailment, censorship,
| commercial control etc. just fail.
| afh1 wrote:
| Ironically behind a paywall (and below a political ad)
| tempfile wrote:
| > what happened with piano rolls, with records, with radio, and
| with cable--isn't that copyright holders squash the new
| technology. Instead, they cut a deal and start making money from
| it.
|
| > "History has shown that time and market forces often provide
| equilibrium in balancing interests," Wu writes.
|
| It is completely braindead to argue that market forces had
| anything to do with compulsory licensing. It is a matter
| determined by courts in the public interest.
| kbbgl87 wrote:
| > "Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million
| books and nobody is allowed to read them."
|
| Greeted with a paywall on the source. Hypocracy...
| shadytrees wrote:
| James Somers writes beautifully;
| https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/james-somers has some of
| his other writing
| mcepl wrote:
| > Copyright terms have been radically extended in this country
| largely to keep pace with Europe, where the standard has long
| been that copyrights last for the life of the author plus 50
| years. But the European idea, "It's based on natural law as
| opposed to positive law," Lateef Mtima, a copyright scholar at
| Howard University Law School, said. "Their whole thought process
| is coming out of France and Hugo and those guys that like, you
| know, 'My work is my enfant,'" he said, "and the state has
| absolutely no right to do anything with it--kind of a Lockean
| point of view." As the world has flattened, copyright laws have
| converged, lest one country be at a disadvantage by freeing its
| intellectual products for exploitation by the others. And so the
| American idea of using copyright primarily as a vehicle, per the
| constitution, "to promote the Progress of Science and useful
| Arts," not to protect authors, has eroded to the point where
| today we've locked up nearly every book published after 1923.
|
| This is disingenuous: the article doesn't mention that the
| biggest proponent of the prolonging of the copyright terms were
| Americans (e.g., Walt Disney Corp and Jack Valenti, see "Mickey
| Mouse Protection Act" for more) not Europeans.
| geniium wrote:
| TL;DR: bye bye Google
| theendisney4 wrote:
| Programmers not law makers really control what goes and doesnt
| online.
|
| Bittorent and ipfs etc are nice but things would be better if
| there was a large static archive with desktop clients exchanging
| chunks in a complex modular way.
|
| Say: I have pages 1-15 of file 123456, you have page 16 but are
| looking for page 1 of doc 2345, if i can obtain that page a fast
| exchange is possible. If not a different module can issue an iou
| that either means i owe something, you are owed something or
| both. Other modules could create groups that aim to store part of
| the archive without duplication amoung members. Spam driven
| modules could also be interesting.
|
| The archive can be organized by how dubious the copyright is so
| that one can limit participation to 50 or 100+ year old
| publications and/or living or dead authors.
|
| Its not unlike living on a far away island with the british
| empire seeking to control every aspect of your life without
| sufficient means of force.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Good. It's important that free access not be permitted. We don't
| know what personal data might be contained within. We should only
| allow those works after a human (appropriately certified) has
| verified that no personal data exists within.
|
| If it exists within the book must be destroyed in its entirety.
| Too many works of so-called scholarship have relied on the
| personal letters of dead people.
|
| We should not reward grave robbing. The most important thing is
| the personal data. We must protect the personal data.
| mparnisari wrote:
| > We don't know what personal data might be contained within
|
| You really think that a book author doesn't know that whatever
| they put on a book will stay there forever?
|
| What a weird take :p
| renewiltord wrote:
| They could have put other people's personal data in. The only
| thing that matters is personal data. We have a right to
| making sure it's removed. Once these massive privacy risks
| are dealt with we can start again. But only after we have a
| comprehensive report of the environmental consequences of
| this.
|
| We've all had enough of people just stomping over our rights
| in this move fast and break things / ask forgiveness instead
| of permission crap.
|
| Do it right. And respectfully instead of abusing people's
| data.
| mparnisari wrote:
| Would it not be a viable solution to let Google scan and sell
| books, but force them to give the profit from the sales to the
| government?
| rekabis wrote:
| Let's rewrite copyright law:
|
| 1. The author gets to say, "I produced this", and to control if
| it gets published.
|
| 2. Exclusive copyright for 15 year terms.
|
| 3. Renewal possible if author still alive. Non-human rights
| holders (corporations, etc.) limited to 30 years total (one
| renewal) from date of first publication, regardless of item
| ownership. Failure to renew automatically opens up the product.
|
| 4. Existing copyright can be overridden if demand isn't being
| adequately serviced (sliding scale, challenger must capture
| minimum % of existing market demand to prove). Pricing of
| overriding attempts must be reasonable, only cost of production
| can be directly paid for, everything else goes into an escrow
| account until the attempt is concluded. This is where anti-abuse
| rules for _both_ sides are most extensive.
|
| Information and knowledge _must_ be free. Our civilization
| depends vitally upon that freedom.
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