AI developers are buying up old books in Germany in large numbers
14 hours ago
- #AI Training
- #Book Digitization
- #Copyright Issues
- German booksellers report a surge in demand, with orders sometimes matching annual revenue, facilitated by Zoom Books.
- High demand for scientific/academic literature, regional history, linguistics, economics, and law books, especially with historical linguistic features for AI training.
- Interest increased as AI developers exhaust public online texts; Anthropic's Panama project involved cutting book covers to digitize, destroying physical copies.
- Booksellers fear this practice spreading to Europe, comparing it to a gold rush and raising copyright and cultural heritage concerns.
- Legal controversy exists; U.S. companies may use 'fair use' to copy copyrighted works without consent, a key argument in AI training lawsuits.
- Focus on copyright-protected books from the 1970s onward, risking cultural loss, as earlier German works are already digitized.