> The law is effectively forcing companies to spend millions re-scanning the same books over and over for no reason
Would anyone agree if you replaced companies with people in that argument?
Why shouldn't a company follow the same rules as everyone else just because the scale at which they're doing it is so large?
I'd argue a company doing something like this should be forced to buy the books NEW and benefit the authors, and if they're found guilty of copyright infringement they should be punished at a scale a few orders of magnitude larger than an individual would be.
> Before you can train an AI, you must light 1 million dollars on fire
If I want to train an AI, I probably need to spend a larger part of my budget as an individual to do so than an org, should I be given the resources for free or severely discounted because I want to make money out of it?
I suppose one _could_ argue in favour of such a practice if it was going to benefit society as a whole, but is it?
I'm not saying companies should follow different rules than people, I'm saying the rules as written make no sense. This particular example just happens to make that fact more readily apparent due to the sheer scale of the needless waste involved.
I'm anti-DRM myself, but someone else could argue that the rules are partly doing their job; preventing companies from just gobbling up digital copies, it just happens that they have he resources to take advantage of a loophole by scanning the books in themselves.
The best solution I can come up with would be a digital library where one org, say the internet archive has scanned everything once, then they're charge a licence fee to these orgs to ingest a copy, and the part of the payment goes to the author, no big wastage, the information gets archived and the orgs pay their share.
Would anyone agree if you replaced companies with people in that argument?
Why shouldn't a company follow the same rules as everyone else just because the scale at which they're doing it is so large?
I'd argue a company doing something like this should be forced to buy the books NEW and benefit the authors, and if they're found guilty of copyright infringement they should be punished at a scale a few orders of magnitude larger than an individual would be.
> Before you can train an AI, you must light 1 million dollars on fire
If I want to train an AI, I probably need to spend a larger part of my budget as an individual to do so than an org, should I be given the resources for free or severely discounted because I want to make money out of it?
I suppose one _could_ argue in favour of such a practice if it was going to benefit society as a whole, but is it?