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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.
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.
Yep, it should just be illegal as a whole
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.
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.
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.
I think it is to avoid dealing with unauthorised copies. If you forbid their existence, you never have to deal with them. Much easier than making laws about what you can and cannot do with the copies you made or what someone else can/cannot do with the copies that you made.
This is probably coming from the music/film industry lobbying. They are generating artificial scarcity. Not unlike the diamond industry.
Fairly certain precedent has already determined copyright is violated at the time of duplication regardless if destroyed afterword. This judge clearly didn't want to bother with this headache of a case.
...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.
In a rational world with perfect information, yes, limiting the supply would help the artist. The world is not strictly rational. As someone with family in the book business, I can promise you that there are tons of irrational buyers.
Book buyers will buy because they see other people reading that authors books (more copies in the world means more sales in this case), they will buy special editions of their favorite books they already own, they will buy copies of books that they intend to read once and give to a friend even when the library is a block away and has copies, they will pay extra to have a hardcover new release even though there are effectively infinite other books that could entertain them until the paperback is released. Rational economic choices are actually not a given at the consumer level.
I fully agree about copyright. As a wild example, unless jk Rowling dies in the next three years, Harry Potter will have US copyright that started in the 20th century, and extends into the 22nd century.
The book burners of the modern age.
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.”
Common law is insane, this is just the last example.
Wasn’t the ruling following the copyright statute?
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.
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.
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.
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.
1786782923 | Secondhand UK and Irish booksellers suspect AI firms behind strange bulk orders | https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/15/uk-irelan... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49308856
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...
You should look at the first decade of other capital-intensive companies, like FedEx or spacex.
The whole point of investment in private companies is to subsidize u profitable operations. If companies came out the gate being profitable they wouldn’t need investors.
> How do they afford to buy all the books in the world?
You are on a VC website at first place, what question is this?
The same way they can afford to build new data centres - they get investment money.
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.
> If anything this is the least dubious way to acquire training material.
Yeah, I emotionally felt a little upset because books are being destroyed and I don't like that. But rationally, this seems very much like a win-win.
The second hand bookstores are getting revenue that they otherwise wouldn't be which means they have an easier time staying in business. AI companies get their materials legally. And it possibly pushes a second publishing run which ultimately benefits authors.
I think the only way this is possibly "bad" is if a rare/hard to get book is destroyed from these ventures. That would be horrible. But I doubt that's very likely as there's almost no such thing as a rare book that AI trainers would be particularly interested in.
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.
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.
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.
Related:
AI companies are shredding rare books