Whatever judge ruled that it was legal to scan and use books if and only if you DESTROY a copy of the book was truly a moron. The law gets bent by judges all the time to be practical and fair, they should have used this opportunity to give a more sane ruling.
It's both. The court has ruled that they can't make a copy of the book, but if they scan and destroy the original then it's fine because it's not creating additional copies.
By that insane logic a digital copy isnt a copy. So a digital copy of a bluray isnt a copy either. I guess piracy isnt piracy as long as i destroy the original. Sweet! Are we finally seeing the "lets treat digital as if corporial" concept crumbling?
Even if you ignore the nonavoidable copies which happen during normal usage of digital files there is no way they don't dozens of different real copies of their training dataset across many different servers accessible by many people.
You are describing “piracy”. The laws against copyright violation are what require both the destruction of the book, and not distributing it.
The whole thing is exceptionally stupid, and really, they should just download the archive copy of Anna’s archive (which is what the Chinese are doing, and what US labs were doing)
The AI giants were arguing that if they bought the books they can scan them. The court said they can if the original doesn't exist anymore. The same court would presumably be ok with you making a digital copy of a VHS but only if you destroyed the original tape afterwards.
The result is moronic but given the confines a judge is operating what else could he do? Is it legal for you to buy a book and tear it down? The problem is the law, and the people who vote for the legislative bodies not asking more from their representatives.
The ruling did not say that. This has been widely misreported. The books are destroyed because it's much easier and faster to cut off the spine and use a sheet fed scanner. Non destructive scanners are much slower.
yep - if these were only scanning books & end there then most people wouldn't have complaints.
but nah they're destroying very rare, out of print books in the process.
then after - when you ask their stochastic parrot some fringe question it won't answer cz of 'safety'. when literally one could buy a book and find the answer.
“Very rare, out of print books…” Horsepoop. 99% of the books they are doing this to are the like of “The Guide to Memphis 1971,” or “How to Use Lotus Organizer for IBM OS/2: For Beginners (1999).”
...so like, I'm not actually sure the copy and destroy thing is wrong. Hear me out. As an artist, the value of your work is directly related to how many copies are in circulation. You have been paid for the existing copies--you would like those to go out of circulation so that you can mint new copies without deflating the price.
The actual problem is that copyright lasts too long. Imagine if copyright was only 13 years. There's obviously no need to destroy anything that's out of copyright. Anything newer than 13 years should either still be in print, or the original author consciously decided to take it out of print, as is their prerogative.
So reading more I guess the judge narrowly ruled that destructive scanning is legal because of the one to one replacement, but didn’t rule on whether or not non-destructive scanning would be legal. It’s still not tested if scanning in that way would count as transformative fair use.
Books are seemingly more expensive than ever but paradoxically declining in material and substantial quality (i.e., are poorly edited and printed). Buying used books is just good financial sense.
My preferred book format is also the mass-market paperback, which the current publishing industry has decided should no longer exist, probably because they found they could not charge over $20 for them.
I can also find decades' worth of quality books for prices that sometimes drop below $1 (though popular / rare books are frequently sold for more than their original asking price now, but inflation-adjusted, that is still a good deal, and much less than a new book). There is no reason to expect that just because something was just published recently that it is worth many multiples the cost of an older book. I will still buy new books to support authors I particularly like, but as prices keep going up, I find I am becoming more and more selective.
And finally, physical books do not spy on me or show me ads, or otherwise try to coerce me into an abusive relationship, like every other form of entertainment seems to attempt to do these days.
Exactly this. I'm not entirely certain AI has anything to do with it but my last book purchases have been entirely used.
Our local independent book shop got together with a couple other dozen and started a used book platform. If I have a book I don't want, I'll let them know, if they have a buyer, I just bring it to them and get a small amount of money. They take a fee for the handling and everyone's happy.
A used book is usually max half the price of new and there is a decently wide selection.
A lot of online retailers have also started stocking used books as a cheaper alternative.
I don't know about globally but in the US anything that isn't sure to be a mass market item is going to be print on demand. While there's some perfectly good print on demand out there, it's often of lower quality than conventional printing.
Again I have not seen it. I am sure in certain niches used book prices have gone up as almost all second hand items have with resellers and the internet. But I have been buying used books for decades and they are as cheap as ever. so what phenomenon are you experiencing?
I'm saying that even public domain books are pricier yet lower quality for the price than ever. As others have pointed out, the mass market paperback has vanished from non-used bookstores.
I suspect I misunderstood you and by "new releases" you are referring to non-used books. Yes, the entire point is that they are too expensive to justify purchasing.
Regarding subsidy/profits: Anthropic at least seems to be on track to report a profitable Q2 2026
> Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
It's because of American law. If it were sane, everyone could share. Instead, if there are 25 copies of a book in existence, 25 different AI companies could buy them and pulp them. Woe be it if some company's lawyer has decided that they need to buy a new copy for each model they train.
Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.
If there are only 25 copies and it's impossible to buy a new copy from the publisher, who's actually getting hurt if you "pirate" that book? How can anyone claim losses if they clearly don't want your money for a new copy.
Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase.
The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.
One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.
The issue people have with it isn't about copyright. It's about how offensive it is that AI companies are mass buying and then destroying physical books by the millions. It's the same reason people were outraged when those two fools chopped down the ancient Sycamore tree at Hadrian's Wall. "But it's just a tree!"
No, it isn't. It's much, much more than that. There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature. Whether they paid people for the books is completely besides the point.
Most of these books were destined for the landfill or recycling plant eventually.
They are being bought by the pound and/or container.
It’s really a totally made up thing to be upset about, since it’s at least giving these books a chance at being archived somewhere and one last productive use.
Apparently many are surprised that libraries, thrift shops, used book stores, etc. destroy books by the ton every year. There is a small boutique industry that buys them in bulk, sorts through them to find books that still might have value, and discards the rest.
Yeah, a few rare and/or valuable titles will get mixed in. Just the law of large numbers. But no one actually wants to read that Programming Perl 1.0 book from the 90s anymore. They just like the idea of someone else paying for it to exist on a shelf somewhere. And someone else doing the curation to sort that 1 rare gem out of 15,000 titles just dropped off by the truckload from the local library system.
Yeah people (including me) tend to hoard books they buy and never toss them. All that does is force your estate to buy a larger dumpster when you die.
>There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature.
even my small town in a not particularly environmentally-conscious country has had those boxes for paper recycling since the 90s. I personally dumped a metric ton of pristine condition books into them after my grandparents died, because I had neither space nor desire to store a cubic meter of that utterly obsolete medium. there's nothing sacred about paper, just like there was nothing sacred about clay tablets and sheepskins it had replaced. a nail-sized SD card can hold more books than the largest libraries in the world. venerating paper and libraries, at this point, is an irrational fetish.
As the author of several comprehensively obsolete books on programming, I'd be honored to have the spine cut off and to have them digitized, as if there were still some value in the words and code my co-authors and I created those years ago. Otherwise they'd be pulped or used as kindling anyway.
Whatever judge ruled that it was legal to scan and use books if and only if you DESTROY a copy of the book was truly a moron. The law gets bent by judges all the time to be practical and fair, they should have used this opportunity to give a more sane ruling.
I thought they were destroyed just because they rip out the spine to scan them more easily?
That is an element, but given the PR cost I’m sure they would use non-destructive scanning if they could.
No, the core problem is that keeping a scan is legal if and only if you destroy the physical copy.
Which is completely bonkers, because they are going to go on and make copies of their scanned copies- for backup purposes.
It would have made more sense for them to be required to store, maintain, and never sell the original.
What if taking the first picture of the Mona Lisa required it to be destroyed?
Yep, it should just be illegal as a whole
It's both. The court has ruled that they can't make a copy of the book, but if they scan and destroy the original then it's fine because it's not creating additional copies.
By that insane logic a digital copy isnt a copy. So a digital copy of a bluray isnt a copy either. I guess piracy isnt piracy as long as i destroy the original. Sweet! Are we finally seeing the "lets treat digital as if corporial" concept crumbling?
Even if you ignore the nonavoidable copies which happen during normal usage of digital files there is no way they don't dozens of different real copies of their training dataset across many different servers accessible by many people.
Yeah wtf putting something in ram for temporary use is a copy but this isn't?????
What was the supposed reasoning there? That the company can’t resell the books to profit or let others read or scan them?
That keeping the physical copy intact would mean creating a copy, and they don’t have the copy right.
I see the reasoning. I don't like or agree with it though but thank you for explaining it.
I think it shouldn't be illegal unless you give the copy to someone else.
You are describing “piracy”. The laws against copyright violation are what require both the destruction of the book, and not distributing it.
The whole thing is exceptionally stupid, and really, they should just download the archive copy of Anna’s archive (which is what the Chinese are doing, and what US labs were doing)
The AI giants were arguing that if they bought the books they can scan them. The court said they can if the original doesn't exist anymore. The same court would presumably be ok with you making a digital copy of a VHS but only if you destroyed the original tape afterwards.
The result is moronic but given the confines a judge is operating what else could he do? Is it legal for you to buy a book and tear it down? The problem is the law, and the people who vote for the legislative bodies not asking more from their representatives.
Common law is insane, this is just the last example.
The ruling did not say that. This has been widely misreported. The books are destroyed because it's much easier and faster to cut off the spine and use a sheet fed scanner. Non destructive scanners are much slower.
yep - if these were only scanning books & end there then most people wouldn't have complaints.
but nah they're destroying very rare, out of print books in the process.
then after - when you ask their stochastic parrot some fringe question it won't answer cz of 'safety'. when literally one could buy a book and find the answer.
“Very rare, out of print books…” Horsepoop. 99% of the books they are doing this to are the like of “The Guide to Memphis 1971,” or “How to Use Lotus Organizer for IBM OS/2: For Beginners (1999).”
Don’t be a Luddite for the sake of being “edgy.”
It doesn’t matter what percentage of the books aren’t rare, it matters what percentage of rare books are getting shredded.
As an aside, a lot of old things like “Memphis guide” are useful to a variety of researchers.
Hopefully someone will leak these archives so at least the knowledge isn’t lost.
...so like, I'm not actually sure the copy and destroy thing is wrong. Hear me out. As an artist, the value of your work is directly related to how many copies are in circulation. You have been paid for the existing copies--you would like those to go out of circulation so that you can mint new copies without deflating the price.
The actual problem is that copyright lasts too long. Imagine if copyright was only 13 years. There's obviously no need to destroy anything that's out of copyright. Anything newer than 13 years should either still be in print, or the original author consciously decided to take it out of print, as is their prerogative.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup
the judge didn’t rule on that specifically
the article mentions it
So reading more I guess the judge narrowly ruled that destructive scanning is legal because of the one to one replacement, but didn’t rule on whether or not non-destructive scanning would be legal. It’s still not tested if scanning in that way would count as transformative fair use.
which case are you reading?
You can donate to Anna's archive with over 20 different payment methods. It's one of the best ways to preserve and distribute knowledge.
https://annas-archive.gl/donate
Too bad that website doesn't work for me. The "checking your browser" screen just reloads infinitely.
Books are seemingly more expensive than ever but paradoxically declining in material and substantial quality (i.e., are poorly edited and printed). Buying used books is just good financial sense.
My preferred book format is also the mass-market paperback, which the current publishing industry has decided should no longer exist, probably because they found they could not charge over $20 for them.
I can also find decades' worth of quality books for prices that sometimes drop below $1 (though popular / rare books are frequently sold for more than their original asking price now, but inflation-adjusted, that is still a good deal, and much less than a new book). There is no reason to expect that just because something was just published recently that it is worth many multiples the cost of an older book. I will still buy new books to support authors I particularly like, but as prices keep going up, I find I am becoming more and more selective.
And finally, physical books do not spy on me or show me ads, or otherwise try to coerce me into an abusive relationship, like every other form of entertainment seems to attempt to do these days.
Exactly this. I'm not entirely certain AI has anything to do with it but my last book purchases have been entirely used.
Our local independent book shop got together with a couple other dozen and started a used book platform. If I have a book I don't want, I'll let them know, if they have a buyer, I just bring it to them and get a small amount of money. They take a fee for the handling and everyone's happy. A used book is usually max half the price of new and there is a decently wide selection.
A lot of online retailers have also started stocking used books as a cheaper alternative.
I don't know about globally but in the US anything that isn't sure to be a mass market item is going to be print on demand. While there's some perfectly good print on demand out there, it's often of lower quality than conventional printing.
Is that really the case? Anecdotally but I remember new releases cost more historically.
This phenomenon is hardly exclusive to new releases.
Again I have not seen it. I am sure in certain niches used book prices have gone up as almost all second hand items have with resellers and the internet. But I have been buying used books for decades and they are as cheap as ever. so what phenomenon are you experiencing?
I'm saying that even public domain books are pricier yet lower quality for the price than ever. As others have pointed out, the mass market paperback has vanished from non-used bookstores.
I suspect I misunderstood you and by "new releases" you are referring to non-used books. Yes, the entire point is that they are too expensive to justify purchasing.
We're no longer an economy that produces things to be consumed, but rather one that produces things that increase consumption.
Could be the makings of a dark age.
Don't all these AI companies run at negative margins? How do they afford to buy all the books in the world?
I don't see how these companies are not already bankrupt given how much they subsidize
Regarding subsidy/profits: Anthropic at least seems to be on track to report a profitable Q2 2026
> Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-ipo-valuation-hin...
The same way they can afford to build new data centres - they get investment money.
It's because of American law. If it were sane, everyone could share. Instead, if there are 25 copies of a book in existence, 25 different AI companies could buy them and pulp them. Woe be it if some company's lawyer has decided that they need to buy a new copy for each model they train.
Otherwise, I think it's good that books are being scanned. Please, AI companies, keep all of the scans, clean them so they can be compressed tightly, back them up to an insane degree, encourage your employees to make their own archives and share them with their friends, and leak them to libgen, annas-archive, etc.
The copyright law here is broken in general.
If there are only 25 copies and it's impossible to buy a new copy from the publisher, who's actually getting hurt if you "pirate" that book? How can anyone claim losses if they clearly don't want your money for a new copy.
The authors of the alternative books, which you might have bought instead if your weren’t reading old books like a high seas pirate.
Yes it is probably due to AI training. The clue is that it's bulk orders driving the increase.
The annoying thing about the article is the hand wringing. If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material. They are paying the correct party to get that material. AI training is at least as transformative as throwing the words into an inverted index for web search.
One thing this demonstrates is that there's still training material to be mined that's original, and high enough quality to have been published on paper. This source of material won't get mined out until all the similar material originally written in major foreign languages get scanned and translated for training purposes. We are in the gentle slopes of the lower foothills of the never gonna be AGI so I'll call it singularity.
The issue people have with it isn't about copyright. It's about how offensive it is that AI companies are mass buying and then destroying physical books by the millions. It's the same reason people were outraged when those two fools chopped down the ancient Sycamore tree at Hadrian's Wall. "But it's just a tree!"
No, it isn't. It's much, much more than that. There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature. Whether they paid people for the books is completely besides the point.
Most of these books were destined for the landfill or recycling plant eventually.
They are being bought by the pound and/or container.
It’s really a totally made up thing to be upset about, since it’s at least giving these books a chance at being archived somewhere and one last productive use.
Apparently many are surprised that libraries, thrift shops, used book stores, etc. destroy books by the ton every year. There is a small boutique industry that buys them in bulk, sorts through them to find books that still might have value, and discards the rest.
Yeah, a few rare and/or valuable titles will get mixed in. Just the law of large numbers. But no one actually wants to read that Programming Perl 1.0 book from the 90s anymore. They just like the idea of someone else paying for it to exist on a shelf somewhere. And someone else doing the curation to sort that 1 rare gem out of 15,000 titles just dropped off by the truckload from the local library system.
Yeah people (including me) tend to hoard books they buy and never toss them. All that does is force your estate to buy a larger dumpster when you die.
>There is something inherently revolting about pulping billions of pages of literature.
even my small town in a not particularly environmentally-conscious country has had those boxes for paper recycling since the 90s. I personally dumped a metric ton of pristine condition books into them after my grandparents died, because I had neither space nor desire to store a cubic meter of that utterly obsolete medium. there's nothing sacred about paper, just like there was nothing sacred about clay tablets and sheepskins it had replaced. a nail-sized SD card can hold more books than the largest libraries in the world. venerating paper and libraries, at this point, is an irrational fetish.
As the author of several comprehensively obsolete books on programming, I'd be honored to have the spine cut off and to have them digitized, as if there were still some value in the words and code my co-authors and I created those years ago. Otherwise they'd be pulped or used as kindling anyway.
Books like that are not what I am talking about.
Your prissy outrage isn't a convincing argument that they are doing anything wrong.
Books are lumps of cellulose carrying information. Destruction of excess copies is no more outrageous than discarding excess packets off the internet.