>VERBOSE Maximum verbosity.

You can play this Red Dwarf fangame in your browser here.

You can find my post about a graphical Red Dwarf fangame here.

Black and white line drawing of Guybrush Threepwood from Tales of Monkey Island talking to the artist's original pirate character Eduardo. He has a pointed goatee, medium-length straight hair cut straight at about halfway down his neck, and wears a lace-up shirt with the collar open to his breastbone and popped up at the back. Rufus from the adventure game Deponia looks on in the background.

Guybrush looks upward and thinks, "Was I like this at 20…?"

Guybrush pictures his younger self at the time of LeChuck's Revenge. This Guybrush looks downtrodden and is sniffling away tears. A list of traits is next to the picture: Washed up, divorced, soooo immature about it, wrote too many books about both. The current Guybrush closes his eyes in cringing embarrassment and thinks, "Nooooo I was worseeee…". Eduardo thinks, "Wonder if I should get a coat like that…"

Diné Weaver Venancio Aragón

"From researching historic twill patterns in museum collections to dyeing wool with Kool-Aid, Diné (Navajo) weaver and instructor Venancio Aragón interlocks research and experimentation to expand the visual and technical vocabularies of Diné weaving. Working on the Diné upright loom, Aragón is part of a generation of Diné weavers who reinterpret ancestral knowledge through experimentation, carrying the medium forward on their own terms. As he stated in our interview with him, “I am not a purist.”

Based in Farmington, New Mexico, Aragón is trained in cultural anthropology and Native American and Indigenous studies, currently teaching at Diné College, the Navajo Nation’s tribal college. Before transitioning to full-time weaving and teaching, Aragón worked as an interpretive park ranger at the Mesa Verde, Aztec Ruins, Bandelier, and Petroglyph National Monuments, where he led tours and developed public education initiatives. He was born to the Tó’aheedlíinii (The Water Flow Together People) clan and born for the Naakaii (Mexican people). His maternal grandfather is of the Tsénahabiłnii (Sleeping Rock) clan, and his paternal grandfather is of the Naakaii (Mexican people)."

Confirmed.

"training AI on a book without paying for it is stealing" -> "fine, we'll buy the book"

"if you pay for one copy you can only keep one copy" -> "okay, so we'll shred the physical copy and keep the digital one"

"now nobody can read it!" -> "you couldn't read our copy anyway, because we're not interested in selling it, and you've set up a legal framework where you can't read books without paying for them"

Point 3 has been a problem as long as books and markets have existed. Point 2 is the most common legal solution for digital lending libraries. The only thing that's new is point 1, and that's a direct response to lawsuits that people on this website have long cheered.

There is no good reason to require this. There are several bad reasons to require this. But it is required.

This is why digital libraries keep these physical copies, and can't legally sell them, or give them away, or lend them (libraries forbidden to lend!), or destroy them. The books just stand there uselessly, taking storage space. A complete waste, and yet another monument to the stupidity of copyright law.

If you're not lending digital copies though, you are not obliged to keep the originals. You could sell them or give them away. In the US this would be perfectly legal, since the first-sale doctrine summarily overrides copyright. You bought it, you own it, and you don't need the rightsholder's permission to sell it again. Or, you can shred it to pieces.

So let's talk about how book-scanning on a mass scale actually works.

Google Books and the Internet Archive pioneered book-scanning methods that do the job without harming the physical copy. The last part was necessary when the books were on loan from libraries: the Google Books M.O. for the biggest copyright heist in history was going to university libraries and telling them "hey, lend me your collection and I'll digitise it for free!", which of course they would be crazy to refuse. When the books were borrowed by the Internet Archive (typically public domain), or purchased with the required ratio of 1 physical / 1 digital copy, it was also necessary to keep the book intact. (Also, unlike everyone else discussed here, people in the Internet Archive actually love books.) But these scanning methods require skilled workers, and some very specialised and expensive machines.

[x]

More importantly, these methods take a lot of extra time. They're manual.

On the other hand, the fastest way to scan a book is to unceremoniously break off the spine, and aggressively feed the pages to a high-speed scanner. Google Books did that first, for the books it purchased or otherwise collected (not all of it is from libraries). Because a company that scans on a mass scale its own, not on-loan books, and is NOT obliged by law to keep a copy, has simply no incentive to wait who knows how long, and pay extra cash, just to keep the books intact. All it wants is to do this as fast as possible.

So basically, AI companies are using the same scanning method Google Books used for the books it didn't borrow. (Intellectual Property lovers, remember to give credit to the folks at Google for inventing the method!) By design, the books are destroyed in the process of scanning.

Speaking of Intellectual Property lovers, I don't know what their problem is, they got what they wanted! The rightsholders attempted to make scraping/analysing data a matter of copyright infringement (it's not) and they failed (thankfully). Then they noticed that in some cases the training corpus was acquired via good old piracy, and went oh no, you can't do that! It's copyright infringement! And here they succeeded (because let's be real, it was), and the AI companies went "alright then, we won't pirate books any more, we'll legally buy them". And they did.

The tiny violins we're hearing right now are not really about "rare" (pre-2022, huh?) books getting destroyed. They're about books bought in bulk second-hand. And hey, remember that US first-sale doctrine? You know what it means when you buy a book second-hand? No royalties for the rightsholders. The book was already sold, and they've already got their cut. They're not getting it again. Sorry guys. If it makes you feel better, when you buy second-hand furniture, you don't pay royalties to the carpenter either.

P.S. Free tip, never say "authors" or "artists" or "creators" in matters of copyright. Instead, train yourself to always say "rightsholders". Because that's where copyright applies to, NOT authors. (Of course sometimes they're the same person, but for most works in circulation, they're not, there's a publisher or a platform or an IP hoarding corporation, heirs and "estates" and trolls and middlemen of all sorts.) It will help you understand the situation and the stakes.

A photo of Dr. Nancy Grace Roman holding a model of the Hubble Space Telescope.

You have to be a pretty big deal for NASA to name a space telescope after you, and that is certainly the case for Dr. Nancy Grace Roman — our Roman Space Telescope’s namesake. She’s sometimes called the “mother of Hubble,” but she’s really the mother of all space-based observatories and NASA science in general. As NASA’s first chief astronomer, Dr. Roman's vision and leadership supercharged space science and helped make NASA the world-class scientific institution it is today.