European Writers Come out Against Destructive Copying

The European Writers' Council has come out strongly against what they call the practice of "destructively scanning millions of old and rare European books." However, it is not entirely clear what they are primarily objecting to. The issue is really two issues, and the authors may be primarily concerned about the second one.

The more stated issue involves destroying books. What is happening is the AI companies are copying the texts of millions of old books in order to provide the data to answer users' questions. In order to make copies as efficiently and inexpensively as possible, the AI companies cut off the bindings and feed the pages through a scanner. That is cheap and easy, but obviously, it destroys the book.

The other issue is copyright protection. Many of the books copied are under copyright protection. This may sound like a copyright violation on the surface, but they are not making copyrighted books available to the public. They are only displaying "snippets," sort of like quoting from a copyrighted book. That is legal, at least in the U.S. It fits under the "fair use" exception to copyright protection. Every student who has ever written a book report would be a criminal without this "fair use" exception to copying limited portions of a copyrighted book. This may be more complicated with European books as European laws apparently don't recognize this exception.

There is a difference in that the students only copy a small portion of a book . AI programs copy the entire book, but then only display small portions of the text, depending on the question it has been asked. That is more like the book report.

The question is further complicated here by the lack of clarity as to what the European authors are upset by. My guess is it's not the "destructively" part though that is at the head of their complaint. After all, many old books are readily available in many copies. Libraries and others may be throwing these out when they are no longer being used. Nobody wants all these copies. This is something libraries don't particularly like to talk about, but they throw away many old books when they're no longer being borrowed but are taking up valuable shelf space. If nobody wants them, and they aren't of value, they are going to be pulped anyway.

So what is the issue? Is it that books are being destroyed, or is it that copyrighted books are being copied? My guess is it's the latter, even if the issue is framed in terms of the former. Most authors and publishers don't care that much what you do with a book provided you buy it and they get their royalties. That is all they can control anyway.

As long as the issue is described as one of destroying old books, it will deflect from the real issue here. Many of these old books will be destroyed for lack of interest anyway. The question is the use of copyrighted books in a way vastly different from traditional use - copies loaned by libraries. A copy needed to be purchased for each library and each book owner. Now, one copy can be used to post it online, and everyone can read it while authors and publishers only get the negligible royalties for one single copy. The internet has made it possible to share unlimited copies made from one single purchased copy. If this happens, authors will have little financial incentive to produce new books. Many great books will never be written. This will need to be sorted out between the authors, publishers, websites, and in particular, governments. And, a solution will have to be imposed everywhere, or else a rogue state may published copyrighted books at will on its website. Nothing is easy.

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European Writers Come out Against Destructive Copying

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European Writers Come out Against Destructive Copying

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