From a historical precedent standpoint, this is akin to the burning of the library of Alexandria, where centuries of knowledge was destroyed and leaving a limited version of the history, the surviving one, and depriving successive generations of significant amount of latent knowledge.

Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available. As stated in my first paragraph, they are not the exclusive stewards of humanity despite them anointing themselves as such. Granted, a lot of these books might not be that useful, but still a relic of times pre-machine generated text, which makes them valuable if only for their archival value.

There was a time of course when you could pull my books down from archive.org as PDFs. Perhaps that time will come again.

I'll look into libgen.

https://gist.github.com/cemerson/043d3b455317d762bb1378aeac3...

> The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other.

So that there was still only one “copy” of the book. This is in compliance with the DMCA. You can make a personal digital copy of a work but then you cannot resell the hard copy and keep the digital one. Same principle applies here.

This isn't theoretical, AI companies have finished lawsuits about this and this was the ruling.

A person can digitize their own books without destroying the original. So can Anthropic. They are choosing to destroy the books for easier scanning and trying to palm off the blame for it.

I'm old enough to have been around when DCMA legislation was under discussion. Many people were dead-set against it and raised concerns over matters exactly like this. In Rainbows End (2006), Vernor Vinge wrote about a similar scenario where a robot went through the university library shredding books, and scanned the shredded pieces to recombined them into a digital archive.

Anthropic may be doing shady things and may have even done this on their own recognizance, we just don't know. As it stand, this is 100% a consequence of US copyright law, much of which was written by large corporations to protect their own assets.

You’re missing the point. It doesn’t require that they destroy the book, but it precludes them from giving it away. It’s their property, so they can choose to store it, but that has real, ongoing cost and may eventually leave unusable books anyway due to fire, pests, water damage, etc. if they’re not maintained properly.

"For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.

The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital."

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 787 F. Supp. 3d 1007 (N.D. Cal. 2025). https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

To legally retain these scans, you must own the original book. You can sell or give away the original book (sans binding) but it's legally dubious as to whether the scan can be transferred along with it. So if Anthropic has no interest in storing thousands of loose leaf books, they are likely destroying both the original and scan as soon as possible.

At the end of the day, the only thing of value Anthropic has is the trained model which is definitely transferable.

Come on, we did without AI for all our history, we could live without it with no issue (as to me we could live without smartphones, internet, etc if we want).

Computers and computer programs did work much more reliably when they were written by humans, a modern computer system written mostly with AI has bugs that not even in systems that were in use in the 80s (and some of them are even still in service today!) had.

Do you want a planet where the human being is at the center, or the machine? Do you think machines has to be at your service, that you are the one ordering it what to do (that is programming it), or you think you are to be a servant of an AI that takes all the decision for you? Because if you think the second, you want MATRIX or SKYNET, well I don't want MATRIX or SKYNET to be fair (not that it's even possible btw, since AI has anything intelligent in it beside the name, it's just a glorious copy/paste machine).

I’m reminded of the screeds about the dangers of novels.

They literally lie, cheat and steal at any opportunity they have and in any way that they think of. Do not trust a single thing that they say; it is a fool's folly to do so.

A lot of this can already be said about a lot of companies, especially almost any large company, but it goes doubly if not triply so for this new breed of company now.

Aren't the copyright laws forcing them to do this the very ones that would make such archives illegal? The books that could be in such an archive are the books that don't need to be destroyed.

How tho?

Ever sunday at the flea market, I see thousands of books that are rotting, hoping for someone to buy them or at least take them home, so the seller doesn't have to pack them for the trip back. Just the other day, there was a whole bin of books in front of a shop, offering them for 50 cents a piece. They will be destroyed anyways.

Unless they are buying and destroying really old, rare books or important small-print books, it is not much damage. It is not like they will buy "all copies of all of the books", just one. And its just that the data in physical print most likely hasn't been used for training, so this can help you find more unmined quality data. Nobody is stealing your books, preventing you from buying more or destroying all copies of a single book.

And some of these books would rot out of circulation or be destroyed anyways. Some people throw away 80-100 year old books on the regular, as they might just be unimportant to them or the world in general. And once the last copy is thrown or rots, that book will die forever. This way, it will live forever instead, scanned and trained on, conjoined with the rest of our knowledge in a magic machine.

Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.

The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.

The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.

The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.

The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change.

That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.

This is as blatantly false as claiming that the Earth is flat, and the fact that there is no such agreement (descriptive moral relativism) has been firmly established in philosophy for well over a century.

Blind futurists and AI cheerleaders scare me on how cavalier and how many crimes against humanity they ignore.

    > The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today

We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.

And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?

What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?

What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?

Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)

Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.

    > Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.

    > The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.

re: saving books, at a personal level, I try to use the excuse of work to find, read, and do stuff with old books,

https://1517.substack.com/p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval

And yes, people still care. And people who care do things.

The main article is written like it is the "end of the world", just like your random rambling about "climate instability" is just the natural course Earth has been on for its existence, with melting ice.

Random article about powder and stone, completely irrelevant.

The old book mentioned was just a farmer's book; you can find all this history in the area's historical records.

"Skill issue." How old are you? I think it would help you more if you contacted a shelter and talked about what they really do.

Better sources than Wikipedia that explain what they do; it is, of course, different from shelter to shelter, but euthanising due to overpopulation is still part of it. (Like too many books in a library, they need to make room for other books that people want, if it just end up roting on the shelf and nobody loans it over years, either destruction or storage, most don't have space for storage)

https://bestfriends.org/stories/best-friends-magazine/debate...

https://lifelineanimal.org/the-no-kill-controversy/

If they were simply buying the books and doing nothing with them, the public wouldn’t be able to access their copies anyway.

If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up. Hopefully someone will at least be able to purchase their digital scan and hopefully the scan is of decent quality and clearly indicates the provenance of the text.

Books are considered super high quality training data. Anthropic has no reason to get rid of this data that 1. They’ve spent a ton of money on and 2. Will remain useful indefinitely for training LLMs.

> If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up.

The same applies for a digital scan? The information isn’t any more likely to be lost.

I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguably the most likely scenarios are either Anthropic survives and holds them away in perpetuity or Anthropic fails and they are sold off to the highest bidder who does the same.

"Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on.

Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...."

https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...

I don't think many Liberians like the idea that they have to do it; it is just one of those things that has to be done, sadly.

Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.

The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.

If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.

What Amazon is doing is vile."

It is pretty standard procedure.

Keep in mind we wouldn't even know this was happening were it not for investigative journalism.

Pretty feeble investigative journalism if they cannot give us the names of even 5 such books we are supposed to be outraged about.

> Correct. I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades. It would have eventually found its way to the discount rack and then the dumpster. At least this way we're getting some money in that we can use to buy actual cool books/collections, pay salaries and bills, etc.

So... something like Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 - https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...

I make no claims that that's a such a book that's been ordered, but that's the type of book that the reddit post references.

But that's just it, it won't live on forever because, from the perspective of preservation, training is a lossy, noninvertible transformation. The LLM cannot legally produce the book verbatim, it will only spit out a regurgitation of the information, chopped and mingled into a broad information space.

Furthermore, these "magic machines" are not the property of the public. They are owned by a handful of corporations who want to charge you continuously for every token output by the machine. So, not only is the original text locked away forever behind company walls, you now need to pay for access to an approximation of the original contents which you can no longer even verify as being correct because the source is no longer accessible.

If you are cool with this, from a cost perspective you are cool with a deal whereby I trade you access to a definite resource for a one time fee of $N for, instead, a perpetual cost of $M to you every month/day/hour for access to an amalgam in which you cannot even determine what proportion of the resource you are actually getting. You're basically saying you're cool with me selling you some unknown portion of wine for a monthly subscription price instead of selling you a definitive amount of wine for a one time fee. lol.

But unreadable by humans, right?

You seem perfectly fine living in a world where your flea market is devoid of books.

Also, Anna's text implies that the books are scanned and then mischievously destroyed so nobody has access again to the content. That's not the case: the books are "destroyed" before scanning, by dissasembling them in pages so they can be feed to the scanner. Scanning while keeping the book intact is difficult, as you need to software-unwarp the page before OCR'ing it, and expensive as you either need specialized scanners or humans doing it.

Yes, there are plenty of books, many were printed, many have lasted a very long time (plenty over 100 years!).

That says more about the success and utility of the technology than it does about whether individual books should be shredded.

This sentence reminded me of “The Things” by Peter Watts. The Thing in that short story believes it’s actually the good guy and decides to commit “violent integration” for the sake of humanity.

I’m not sure I buy the links premise that Anthropic is doing this with malice, but if it were, would be an eerie parallel.

If a company is scanning material protected by copyright, it has to send a digital copy of the scanned material to Library of Congress within 5 working days.

Copyright should really be amended so that once out of print and a grace period it’s free use. I am probably more of an anarchist in this regard. Similar to my belief that anyone should be able to ingest any data you put online, once a book is no longer being print it should be able to be used for commercial or personal use for free. Similar to a generic drugs.

There is far too much garbage that gets published, let the collective hive mind figure out what is valuable.

That's what governments are for.

Sure some governments and opinions would say so but you’re making a statement of zero impact. Fix the underlying copyright laws don’t create more rules.

https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/

> All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the Copyright Act (section 407 of Title 17).

> This law requires two copies of each work published in the United States be deposited with the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress. Usually, deposited copies must be the “best edition” of the work, which means they must conform to the Library of Congress’s preferred specifications.

> Mandatory deposit applies to any work published in the United States. This requirement does not apply to works first published in a foreign country until they are published in the United States. Copyright registration is optional, but it provides additional legal benefits and fulfills the mandatory deposit requirement with the submission of the required copies.

Just post on r/DataHoarder: "Free 16TB NVMe SSD to anyone who indexes and mirrors the entire out-of-print 20th-century physical archive." The problem would be solved by next Tuesday. With probably 10x redundancy and people willing to do it for free for fun.

How does this help anything, except create more work to throw in the trash?

It’s called “mandatory deposit”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valancourt_Books_v._Garland

> Background Valancourt Books is a print-on-demand independent publishing house specializing in rare and out-of-print books. Valancourt had not registered its books for copyright as the Library of Congress already had original-edition copies of the books Valancourt republishes and any new material in its publications was limited to notes and introductions.

If you want a physical copy of The Sorrows of Satan, you can buy it from them.

Their argument is that the Library of Congress already has a copy of the book ( https://search.catalog.loc.gov/instances/a0f8fcfe-a255-55d2-... ) and having them deposit it again would be unnecessary.

> The Copyright Office has stated that it would modify the language of its deposit demand letters and withdraw its demand for copies if the Copyright Office was notified of the copyright's abandonment.

> Several legislative changes have been proposed to address all elements of the case: changes to Section 407 to tie some legal benefit to the deposit, monetary compensation to copyright holders for depositing books, and regulation for a simple and costless method of copyright abandonment.

That doesn't change that if you were to publish a book today (or for that matter, have published a book in the past 100 years in the US), you are required to deposit a copy of the book with the Library of Congress.

Looked into this a decade ago for publishing eBooks via my personal corp when eReaders and ePub were starting to hit big in the mainstream.

https://www.copyright.gov/mandatory/

> All works under copyright protection that are published in the United States are subject to the mandatory deposit provision of the Copyright Act (section 407 of Title 17).

> This law requires two copies of each work published in the United States be deposited with the Copyright Office within three months of publication. Works deposited under this law are for the use of the Library of Congress. Usually, deposited copies must be the “best edition” of the work, which means they must conform to the Library of Congress’s preferred specifications.

----

> Acceptable Formats for Deposit of Electronic Works

> The deposit of electronic works is arranged with the Acquisitions & Deposits division.

> For electronic-only works, submit the best edition in accordance with the formats listed in the “Electronic-Only Works Published in the United States and Available Only Online” section of the Best Edition Statement (PDF, 135 KB).

> For works subject to a grant of special relief, unless otherwise specified, the Library will accept an appropriate “preferred” format listed on the Library of Congress Recommended Formats Statement. Such files must contain no measures (such as digital rights management [DRM] technologies or encryption) that control access to or prevent use of the digital work.

> For more information about electronic deposit, see the above FAQ “When can I make an electronic deposit of a work?”

---

> When can I make an electronic deposit of a work?

> Works may be deposited in a physical format in accordance with the Best Edition Statement, which can be found in Best Edition of Published Copyrighted Works for the Collections of the Library of Congress (Circular 7B) (PDF, 135 KB).

> Works may be deposited electronically in certain circumstances:

> The Copyright Office issues a written demand for an electronic-only book or serial. If your work is published only online and the Office sends you a written demand for mandatory deposit of the work, you must deposit the work electronically.

> The Copyright Office offers you electronic deposit as an alternative to depositing a physical copy of the work. If you receive a letter offering special relief to deposit a work in an electronic format instead of sending physical copies, follow the instructions in the letter or agreement.

---

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/

https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/text.html

> Neither the deposit requirements of this subsection nor the acquisition provisions of subsection (e) are conditions of copyright protection.

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap4.html#407

Publishing of copyrighted material requires that it be deposited with the Library of Congress.

https://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/trips_e/ta_docs_e/modul...

    (iii) Automatic protection A key feature of the Berne Convention, and thus also of the TRIPS Agreement, is that copyright protection - unlike most other forms of IPRs - may not be subject to any formality of registration, deposit, or the like. This principle is contained in Article 5(2) of the Berne Convention, that has been incorporated into the TRIPS Agreement.

(And at the end of the day, sovereign people are never required to do anything. The concept of international law is an oxymoron)

... And it would require renegotiating the treaty with all of these countries so that AI training is easier. https://www.wipo.int/wipolex/en/treaties/parties/231

... Or it would require the US to withdraw from the WTO and pass new laws for how copyright works.

I don't believe that neither the renegotiation nor the withdrawal would be something that would be done.

... And I believe that automatic copyright (as has been part of the Berne Convention since 1886) is a good thing.

It's to preserve our heritage and knowledge. Automatic copyright is what causes information to be lost. I don't suppose you're going to submit your comment to LoC or otherwise keep it available for 70 years after you die? Does everyone remember to submit their code they publish?

We're not losing books because of AI companies. We already lose them because the law makes it so only groups like Anna's Archive can save them.

Copyright does not expire for a very long time. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was released ~30 years ago in 1997. It remains protected for the duration of the life of the author (J.K. Rowling) plus 70 years.

Given actuarial tables from the UK[1], this works out to be around ~95 years from now (~2120).

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

The library of congress does distribute some digitized works that are out of copyright. And it does digitize some works for archival and distribution, but having additional works digitized for (eventual) public use could be nice.

It is not at all clear that this is true.

The number of books published every year is growing rapidly. According to Bowker the number of books published in the US every year has increased ~15x in the past two decades [1].

Because of this, I suspect that the median age of the books we are discussing is below 30 years.

[1] https://www.writercosmos.com/blog/how-many-books-published-p...

Let's view it realistically here: AI companies are parasites. Them destroying books to dumb down mankind, absolutely fits into the destruction of the library of Alexandria.

Having said that, I think the day of physical hardcopy of books, is not necessarily over, but will be heavily complemented via digital storage. For instance I only keep books that I may re-read later or read many more times, e. g. thick science books. Many other books I can keep as .pdf file without a problem.

These comparisons are starting to get ridiculous. Why are so many people assuming there is exactly one copy of all of these important books available, that it’s sitting in the warehouse of a bulk book reseller, and that Anthropic is destroying the lone copy?

Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.

After being clickbaited and ragebaited, media consumers feel deeply anxious and angry. But, explaining that they are angry over a boring situation feels silly, not righteous. So, they give summaries, impressions, sometimes extrapolation of the bait they have been consuming. That feels righteous.

This observation applies to a wide variety of topics trending in the various media every day. Distinguishing injustice from ragebait unfortunately requires non-trivial effort from the reader.

Why are you assuming that each book gets scanned exactly one time and then never again? And why are you assuming that out-of-print books remain easily accessible so long as not every copy has been destroyed?

>Your local library throws out books every year and nobody thought twice about it.

When they're damaged beyond hope of repair from decades of wear. As for books that haven't fallen apart from being used as intended and merely are no longer desired, my local library generally sells them off at bargain prices. Of course I can't speak to your local library.

I even read on a web site of a librarian that their library had stopped accepting donations because "patrons should know how to throw away their own trash".

That makes me a lot sadder than AI companies destroying the books but at least preserving (most of) their knowledge.

How often have you thrown out manuals for products you don't use any more?

What happens when the books don't sell?

If all these companies were doing was burning star wars tie-in novels and harry potter sequels nobody would care. That's not their goal because they already have those in their training set. The whole point here is to find rare or underappreciated books from the pre-digital era which nobody ever made publicly available in a digital format.

BTW destroying them isn't even necessary for scanning. It's the easiest way because removing the binding and turning it into a flat stack of papers solves many problems but there are actually dedicated book scanners designed to hold open the book while its photographed, and un-curling pages in post-processing was already a solved problem long before people were using AI to correct images.

Many books aren't lent and not bought and most libraries have limited space to store such books, thus they go where old paper goes.

Of course some rarely lent books are important and for the one person asking for it in ten years really valuable, but many still have to go.

I know it comes at a shock but truly most books are absolutely worthless.

That's not their goal or else they wouldn't be burning books. Their goal is making money no matter the cost to the society.

They're destroying one (1) copy of a mass-produced item for each AI company.

Public libraries destroy millions more yearly as a matter of routine.

This is just part of a CCP-aligned moral panic, along with the water use nonsense, and similar with the soviet-aligned moral panic that destroyed the civil nuclear industry 40 years ago.

Notably since all the controversy many data centers are very loud about being closed loop and with significant consideration given to other local impacts as well.

They don't have to, and the vast majority don't.

The lie and moral panic is that all datacenters necessarily waste precious drinking water; it's patently false and used by agitators to push, unwittingly or not, a Chinese Communist Party agenda.

is it actually? it feels more like US propaganda that we have to let our oligarchs run roughshod over us because of what we imagine the big bad CCP might want.

i dont think the CCP cares whether there's data centers in rural america.

Regulation that requires closed loop cooling seems simple enough, same with lots of the other problems people have with data centers:

* sound and infrasound under x DB

* no air quality change

* must pay to build out electrical infrastructure

etc

its not to the CCPs benefit or loss to make sure the data centers are built well if they get built

They certainly care that the US loses the race for AI.

What was nonsense about water use?

The claim never made sense to me either, I can only assume those that regurgitated such claims never worked with HPC or even general datacenters before.

Was recently talking to a (non-technical) friend about this, she was surprised after talking about the "insane water use for AI datacenters" when I responded that open-loop cooling is pretty rare for a datacenter and I've never actually seen it used before, versus closed-loop (or just regular air-based cooling) which has no real noticable water consumption.

Order of magnitude more water is lost from wasted irrigation (e.g. during rain, of fallow fields, sprayed into windy air, etc) than data centers.

2. Datacenters have been shown to reduce utility prices. They provide suppliers with previsible long term demand which allows for cost-effective network and production planning.

But I understand blaming your energy waifu for its own failure is unacceptable for nuclear bros.

running nuclear plants were shut down while running just fine

What other nonsense do you believe?

Look up Greenpeace Energy, and what cushy corporate job Schroder got after leaving office.

Lying is difficult since you don't have reality to keep your story straight.

I've heard people say this, but I haven't seen any evidence for it. Do you have any evidence?

Exactly the same as shutting down perfectly fine German nuclear plants was aligned with Russian interests.

Not all rare books are valuable. Someone’s self-published junk sitting in the garage is NOT analogous to the library of Alexandria.

Many, most, maybe all of these “rare” books are being scanned instead of just being recycled.

Not a big Reddit fan but there was a great post there from someone in the book industry talking about how non-industry people often give this great moral weight to ever book in a way that is totally disconnected from reality.

All I’ve read, as far as sources go, is a number of rare book sellers saying they’ve had a big uptick in huge orders with no price haggling. Apparently that’s peculiar. And some of them seemed a little concerned.

Now I’m certain they’re not chopping up Davincis notebooks, but I’m not certain there aren’t some that would make people wince.

And I don’t have any reason to think some reddit librarian knows what’s going on, if anything, either way.

Then they should list the names of these books otherwise I say they're alarmist.

It’s very possible I’ve just missed deeper reporting, obviously.

But otherwise I agree. I’m neither losing sleep over it or just trusting that these (historically kinda scummy) businesses are actually behaving.

If there’s a serious problem I’d like to see something more concrete. Same for hand-waving the question.

As an aside, the entire Google Books corpus is generally estimated at tens of millions of books.

“How dare these companies buy rare and valuable books that nobody else values enough to buy” is a self-canceling argument.

There are none.

Look, others talked about how this fetishising of paper books is quite silly (though I don't like it when the destructive scanning is just so one could feed it into a chatbot) but I have to say, all I can do after reading the above sentence is laughing bitterly. Anthropic is an American for-profit company, any talk about "working towards the benefit of humanity" is just marketing lies, and it's always incredible to see people treat those seriously.

_Of course_ Anthropic does that.

Are you referring to the burning of the Serapeum in AD 391 or the warehouse fires in 48 BC?

Also, helps to clarify what exactly the commenter was referring to and possibly help distinguish the centuries-spanning decline of the Library of Alexandria from the violent fate of the Serapeum.

(But my knowledge of Alexandria extends only to episodes of "COSMOS" and "Connections").

How can anyone say this with a straight face. The knowledge is not destroyed, it is transformed. You can make use of it today in the form of LLMs and the scans still exist. Nothing was lost. It's literally no different from them buying books and stocking them in a private library not open to the public. It's not called the Scanning of Alexandria because if it was, it wouldn't have made a blip in the history, Alexandria's libraries were burned, those books, that knowledge was destroyed. Then only thing being destroyed here is physical copy (again for the people in the back: a copy).

> Despite the copyright restrictions that are forcing companies to do this, they should maintain archives that are publicly available.

Those same copyright restrictions are exactly what would prevent them from sharing the archives. Your beef is with copyright, not the AI companies who are (in this one, rare, instance) following copyright laws/rules.

Hyperbole much?

Does the fact that they're being converted to an immutable digital permanent record for all time mean anything to you? Because as far as I know, the works lost to the Library of Alexandria were wiped out of existence, not simply transformed into a more durable form!

Why on earth would they? Ultimate point for these companies is to make a ton of money, obviously they won't shoot themselves in the foot and give away whatever advantage they have, especially not to a free archive which is about doing good in the world, which probably isn't profitable enough for a company to care about.

How is this a question at all? They’re scanning books because the courts determined that it’s the only way to use that data. They are forbidden from using digital copies found on places like Anna’s Archive. They must acquire and scan the book.

They cannot redistribute the book. The Internet Archive tried that and the courts shut it down. You cannot scan a book and share it without violating copyright law.

Hence the “leaking” part.

Companies are paying for the books now, great! And destroying a book is really the best way to scan it. I could destroy the books I buy myself if I wanted, they're my books and I can do whatever I want with them. A book is really just a stack of paper, I don't get the sacred feeling attached to it. Especially since books are printed in thousands to millions of identical copies nowadays.

Now what books exist in a single copy that destroying it would amount to losing knowledge? In any case, I would also expect such books to be very old, have very little useful content for training to start with, and be expensive enough to buy to make training on them unprofitable.

So what's the problem here exactly?

Also from the article:

> It’s outrageous is that it’s legally permissible, but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.

I'm all love for Anna's archive, but still, I find it rich that they now find themselves in position to make strong ethical claims.

There are multiple instances of a book being referred within another book, while at the time the author had access to it, we might not have it today. Taking a rare book and destroying absolutely erases that link we have with the past.

You not seeing a problem with this is the core issue, it's probably why the people doing it (it's people destroying these books not aliens) just shrug and don't feel too bad doing that.

Old books are even more crucial than today's books due to how uncommon it was to have something written/printed and bound. Many unique and single copy books explain to us a ton of things about the past, sometimes for funsies and sometimes for useful findings. Destroying old books is akin to destroying the closest we got to time machines.

OR in-print modern books that they can get for cheaper by buying used. The whole thing is a manufactured outrage over something that doesn't matter. They aren't breaking into museums to steal their only copy of a book and burn it. They are digitizing books. If anything I commend them for what they are doing. If the alternatives were that book rotting on a shelf or being thrown away they doing a great service preserving it, even if they don't make it available publically (which they can't for copyright reasons). It's literally no different from them stocking a private library with these books, except it's better because digital copies are much easier to preserve.

If you've read the articles covering this issue, you'll be aware the concern is over the fate of rare and out of print books, rather than your straw man (ie those available in 'thousands to millions' of copies).

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3rprx2wl4o

> "A recent academic text published in only 100 copies, 75 of which are already in libraries, may be very rare on the market - but it is perhaps not such a great loss if one copy is destroyed," says Derek Walker, owner of Edinburgh bookshop McNaughtan's. > "But we have, and have sold, books which are for example the only known surviving example of an edition from the 18th century. > "It would be a much more significant problem if one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

This idea that there can only be merit in a work if it's commercially viable is incredibly ignorant, and if that becomes the standard for whether a work is preserved or not, we stand to lose a great deal of our cultural heritage.

Detestable if they're doing it anyway to prevent competitors getting hold of it.

> "It would be a much more significant problem IF one like that were to be bought for destruction, having survived this long."

I agree with the sentiment of course but it is really a huge IF they are doing that.

IF they wanted to train on, say, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, why buy an expensive edition from the 1600s when they would get the same text from a Penguin edition for a fraction of the price? It gets much cheaper secondhand too of course.

I'll go further, why would they want to train on expensive rare and out of print books? Are they, perhaps, competing on an AI benchmark based on extensive medieval knowledge of the cosmos? There's been a lot of pearl-clutching about lost obscure knowledge but y'all really reckon that kind of knowledge is valuable to LLMs?

It’s powerful symbolism. It reminds me of that tone-deaf iPad ad that sparked outrage in 2024. The one where all the cultural artifacts were crushed in an industrial press to make a soulless slab of glass. And that was Apple, who is generally well-liked by the public.

Of course you can. Nobody is saying these companies aren't allowed to do what they're doing.

But what they're doing is disgusting and something I can't forgive. It's an escalation of the attacks against society that these companies have been engaging in from the beginning. This isn't about legality, this is about what's right.

Isn't this just doing the work for the AI companies??? Then the AI companies can simply download a copy of Anna's Archive.

Google wanted to share the whole of Google Books 15 years ago, too, but they were sued to hell, so now you get a watered down search functionality.

This is such dangerous train of thought, to give them the benefit of being forced to destroy books. Why is that exactly, and who is forcing them? You can also, you know, find another way?

Like the data centers who currently use very dirty energy acquisition methods (not all of them), are they also "forced" to do this, because they too need to make as much money as the other ones? How long would you continue this idea of others "forcing" for-profit companies to try to make more money, regardless of consequences?

Destroying books used to be an obvious dumb, stupid and shit idea, not sure how somehow a for-profit company making of a digital copy for themselves of the book before destroying it, suddenly makes it not a shit idea for the rest of humanity.

I don't blame the companies for either wanting digitised works, nor following the law. I blame the absurd court ruling, and I blame the publishers for not having digitised the old works themselves, in which case they could just sell e-books to the labs... They are after all the only ones who can legally do it non-destructively.

Baloney. They aren't forced to destroy books. They could leave well enough alone and not scan them to begin with. They're voluntarily choosing to do this.

That's rather beside the point. I don't think anyone is arguing that what they're doing is in some way illegal.

> no modern book

I'm less concerned about modern books.

I'm not convinced they destroy the books to obey the law, lol.

A. Company destroys a book forever for training. Its scan is locked away forever in company records. In this case:

- This information is locked away in the improvisations of an LLM. It is no longer possible to directly access the information as written by the human being that authored it. This constitutes the loss of literary history, or at least loss of access to that history to the general public.

- The price of the book is no longer distinct from the general price of "inference". It becomes increasingly impossible to pay for specific information, instead you are charged by the meter for general machine inference, which doesn't even give you access to a specific text.

- The provenance of information is totally destroyed. This causes potentially unresolvable problems of authority and citation. If the original source is lost, how are we to know if a random LLM claim about an obscure topic or specific niche text is even true or just hallucinated?

B: Company uses freely available scanned copy of the text:

None of the issues above obtain, since anyone can still access the actual book. Most importantly, this reduces the power companies have to force everyone to continually pay for a derivative form of the book's information in perpetuity in the form of token costs.

I much prefer B.

Because these companies have no real strategy beyond trying to capture any and all information they possibly can to try and lock it away and charge the public for it in perpetuity.

And so can everyone else. That's the ideal outcome.

Only Anti-AI types are against this, they probably don't even care about the books, it's just a proxy for trying to stop the "evil AI companies."

They have done zero to destroy the durability. In fact, it’s probably more durable.

If the physical copies are scarce, that is due to the publisher and copyright laws and not them buying and converting a single copy.

Agree. While it certainly isn't the most environmentally friendly to render huge stacks of paper into waste, the real issue is copyright creating scarcity (inability to copy the thing).

Are they? Or are they just using it for training and not keeping the digital copy afterwards? And even if they are keeping a digital copy, does that actually matter if they never release it?

You’re making a distinction here, but training is something you repeat for every new point release, so you need to keep the data if you want to use it for training.

As for long term benefits, it could one day be sold as a service, once copyrights have expired on the works. We can't see it today, but that is purely the result of the law and what the law intended to do from the start, you don't see a copy unless you pay for your own.

After around 2000 books started coming out in digital format, so at least there are digital copies of many of those, even if they are still under copyright.

I ask "Why save physical books?"

If they are truly rare, then they are likely not valuable, otherwise there would be more copies or their contents could be found elsewhere.

Owning and storing physical books is not free, there is a real cost. Even owning and storing the scans is not free, especially when IP rights and challenges get involved, since a scanned book with no distribution is worthless.

I disagree with putting books on a pedestal and saying they must be protected. If they were any good, they would stand on their own, but if we have to run a moral crusade to save them, perhaps we are all better off if they're destroyed.

Sometimes I don't even know how to respond to comments here. I don't want to be rude, but you just have to give this a moment of thought. Is all the media that you find valuable common? I know that's not the case for me based on my own experience.

Doesn't that make them even worse?

"likely" being the keyword here, what about heavily censored books?

The problem isn't with morals or copyright. What we're up in arms about is case law. Past rulings have implied that destruction of books significantly contributes to the process being "transformative". This encourages companies to destroy the books. I think this is really dumb.

Why save physical books? It's because the reason to destroy them isn't good. If you think there's too many bad books out there, that's a different argument. Maybe your fight is against consumerism, I don't know.

That's what I keep saying about the van Goghs I burn to heat my home but everyone is still mad at me!

The Gutenberg bible is rare, its content is not rare, and some would argue that the content itself is not valuable, and yet the Gutenberg bible is valuable.

Same can be said about many books.

- Reader: narrative

- Collector: scarcity of the physical artifact

- AI Company: language samples (quantity, variety), facts

That is literally the opposite of how it works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarcity

Which is really why the outrage cycle over Anthropic's actions is largely misplaced.

Just taking one of those and "destroying them"(it is not destroyed, a digital copy with the ability of doing millions of copies is stored somewhere) is not problematic for Humanity.

By the way, I always search for second hand books. Most of the books there are garbage. Most people clean their shelves with the books they don't care about, but preserve the ones that are good. If they are young people that inherited a house and don't care about books, they pick and sell the good ones, giving away the bad books.

If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more. That is, for every 100 books that are garbage there is one good quality book. It is very rare to find a jewel there.

Books in the former USSR display their print runs on the last page. "Important book" is a vague and arbitrary term, but rhere are works in whole fields (e.g. history, archaeology, linguistics, ethography) that any scholar would consider key references, and as few as 100 copies were printed.

The shadow libraries have made a lot available to the whole world. It would suck if private corporations scan and shred remaining copies of these before the shadow libraries can get a scan.

We have, over the last 15 years, acquired/borrowed from libraries, and scanned a couple of thousand books on all topics of interest. All of them are out of print. Some of the physical copies were have, especially in indicate languages might be some of the few surviving ones

https://mirtitles.org/

https://archive.org/details/@mir-titles

somewhere were we can't access it. as the article states: “permanently locking human knowledge inside private corporate servers”

the issue isn't that the physical copy is gone, it's that they are preventing people from making digital copies that are actually accessible by destroying the physical copies.

> If you go to a recycling centre, the garbage to quality ratio is over 100 or more.

archivists keep everything, because we don't know right now what will be important 100 years from now.

By any metric imaginable, it's making the information more accessible, not less. First, it's taking a single copy of a 10k physical print and it's making it digital. Is it "locked"? Yes, by copyright laws, if you don't like that lobby to have them changed. But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.

Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

I happen to actually actively shop second hand bookstores, so I am potentially affected by this - as opposed to most people complaining because they don't like the idea. And I still absolutely support it.

Help me understand how. Not only are these LLMs expressly prohibited from specifically regurgitating copyright works if the users asks them to, but they habitually hallucinate or paraphrase things wrong.

If they won't regurgitate the copyrighted text verbatim, and are known to be confidently incorrect and hallucinatory, I'm struggling to see how these texts are "immediately available to literally billions".

And I ask this as someone who has had LLMs give me incorrect assertions about the contents of books.

For example, knowledge about how the book smells when you open it, something that reader do talk about enough I don't think this should be a strawman, is lost. But, that is about the experience of reading the book, not the knowledge of the book.

The exact text? Yeah, I think that is largely lost as well. This is a summary. And for rarer books, it will be a particularly bad summary. The basics of the book are being captured in a space that the right question that retrieve it, but worse than a sparksnote and any well read reader will tell you all the sorts of things a sparknotes already loses compared to reading the book directly.

But, that little bit of data is a bit more data than existed before, and future LLMs should get better at giving the information. So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of. If it was between this and a sparksnote of the book being made, the sparksnote is far better, but between this and the book simply being disposed of, then the LLM is better but far, far from great.

That's a lot of assumptions that goes into the judgment, which is probably why different people reach different conclusions. One person is imagine the alternate fate of this book being slowly rotting in a landfill, the other resting on a bookshelf where it is read at least once fully and then flipped through time to time, and neither are wrong.

No, it’s not. Undigitized data is still data. Wording, style, nuance, type, artwork, binding, metadata, attributions, citability… all of these things are permanently lost, which is a fucking tragedy because they don’t have to be. Even if you’re not willing to take the time to scan every page in a cradle scanner, as rare books should be, (and don’t tell me they don’t have the money to get a handful of library interns to do this,) you can disbind the books and store them as they did in the Caselaw Access Project at Harvard Law. They removed the pages from the binding, scanned them on a high speed conveyor belt scanner which yielded full color 600 DPI jp2 images, placed the pages back in the binding like a folio that could be re-bound if needed, vacuum sealed them, and stored them in a salt mine. It’s not like it was slow, either — we did 40k in 18 months and we did take the time to scan the rare ones with a cradle scanner. And we did it all in less than open AI probably spends in a day on inference.

> So, in that sense, the knowledge is better being spread compared to copyright where the book stays in a warehouse until it is disposed of.

That’s a false dichotomy. Libraries exist for this exact reason, and their not already having a copy does not make “you snooze you lose” a morally acceptable strategy.

I’ve been pretty cool on the direction of SV for the past decade at least, but I am absolutely gobsmacked by the unbridled hubris of these companies over the past 5 years.

I understand what you mean but... "permanently lost" sounds dramatic. When I trow away old pictures, old drawings or pieces made by my son at school, they are lost as well. Not that I do that often, but it begs the question, should every 'ip' made by humans be preserved?

A small fraction of them is saved in the model. Far more is saved in the digitized copy as long as they keep it which they have plenty of incentives to do so (future training of newer models).

That's more than what happens if that book was burned or sent to a landfill, but less than if the book is giving a loving home.

>They removed the pages from the binding, scanned them on a high speed conveyor belt scanner which yielded full color 600 DPI jp2 images, placed the pages back in the binding like a folio that could be re-bound if needed, vacuum sealed them, and stored them in a salt mine.

My understanding is that this simply isn't legally allowed for these books. The original must be destroyed for the digital copy to not be copyright infringement.

>That’s a false dichotomy.

I pointed out there is a spread of possible outcomes and that different people are considering different outcomes and the comparison of if this is good or bad depends upon which outcome one considers. I even mention that both outcomes are sometimes right. That's about as far from a false dichotomy as I can see it.

> Plus having the info part of a LLM makes it immediately available to literally billions.

Isn't this a contradiction? I mean, maybe you can invoke a fair use policy if an LLM spits out some text from the scanned book, but then you are _not_ "making it available to literally billions".

I don't if that is true: a lot of old books might still have copy or other rights associated to them, likely owned by author and/or publisher, directly or inherited, but often those who have the rights do not have digital or physical copies at hand anymore (some old books are, well, really old). Does Anthropic make sure to track down, contact and then share the digital copy they make with those who have rights on the work? If not, they are not making it in any way easier to re-print the books, while making their supply more scarce (they destroy existing embodiments).

Citizen's lobbying against megacorp is a mirage.

>But it's _closer_ to being widely available, not farther.

By what metric ? The copy is now guarded by a company instead of being on the second hand market.

Destroying the last copy of a book is OK because you shop for second hand books, and because some private company hold the last digital copy and have no incentive to make sure it survives. Damn..

History tells us that very few "permanent" situations are truly permanent.

Provided a set of information has value (which in this case it clearly does) then the overwhelming likelihood is that, eventually, through some method or other, the information will become public.

If you destroy the only copy of a physical artifact, the situation is as permanent as it can get.

So physical books are rather non-permanent themselves.

I have volunteered with a library, and probably threw hundreds of books over a couple week engagement from a university library into a shredder at the direction of a professional, academic librarian. Libraries are constantly culling books, the EXACT category books we're talking about here (old, never-read). This is happening at a much larger scale, so I would recommend railing against university librarians in addition to the AI juggernauts.

Have you seen evidence that they’re buying only readily available books that are plentiful on the market?

A few years ago, after running into this issue several times, I looked into the economics of it to see if there was a opportunity to republish digitally. I found the sales data for some, the ones that had value were selling on average for around $50-150 dollars. Because the typefaces weren't modern, OCR wasn't scalable. Because only 20-40 were transacted each year, it wasn't worth the time.

What kind of books are they? In my case mostly historical documents by some relatively unimportant person who was highly important for a very, very niche subject. They still contain valuable, irreplacable information.

An analogy: imagine you discover a really cool video game from 20 years ago. You love it and want to find the developer's previous work. But, you find out that the company was purchase by another company which was purchase by another, etc, etc. Sure, maybe the game still exists in some digital vault. But, more than likely it's gone because old things only seem have value these days if some influencer broadcasts it.

It's interesting that libraries are purging them. Several times, I've found that the only available copies were at some random university rare book collection in middle of no where, and basically impossible to access unless one fly in - which isn't worth it. They are often donated by a benefactor and stuck there - which is why they're never read. It's not that the content isn't valuable.

The books we were disposing of were so totally inane that I couldn’t tell you what they were, but they weren’t taken out in like 30-40 years. Northeast US state R1 research university. Maybe we got rid of stuff that would come in handy!

Fetishizing books isn't going to help.

In fact, most of those "rare" books don't sell because nobody wants them. The AI companies are making them even more rare, so the booksellers should be thankful.

Thank you anthropic! Thank you OpenAI! Thank you Google!

But buying all the copies is categorically different and I cannot imagine why they would attempt that, except perhaps to prevent their competition from getting a hold of the same text?

Of course they aren’t buying “all copies”, and that wouldn’t even be possible in most cases since such books are usually flea market/attic material and most copies aren’t for sale (or even catalogued) to begin with.

I’d be interested to learn who comes up with such lies though. Is it really just random people venting their frustration, or some kind of organized astroturfing operation?

But where did you hear that they’re buying “all copies”? And to what end?

To take a crude example in a different medium - new york in the 90s - widely documented right? Yet, if you want to find high definition video of street life in a given burrough on a given day or year, you're faced with an enormously difficult task. There were some HD test videos done in Manhattan in the late 90s (which have been posted to Hackernews before), but there's no equivalent for the other burroughs. Your best best would be finding original negative out takes or location scouting footage from feature films, a very hard task. That's only 30 years ago. Outside of the focal points of the worlds attention - English language, rich countries, places in the news, contemporaneous sources for 'non notable' events (lifestyle, how people spoke dressed etc) is surprisingly poorly preserved.

Hopefully you can infer how this tracks to the written world and primary sources for language, technical manuals etc etc.

I honestly can't and I think you can't either or you would have used an example with books/printed media rather than film, an entirely different ballgame.

Similar textual examples would be any text containing actual language as it's spoken in a given place or time. Or any factual textbook detailing the buildings present in a given location. Or any text book detailing a now defunct construction process. Or any text book (generally small run) detailing a niche interest, now missing ecosystem or the state of a particular political situation at a given time. Essentially all textual primary sources for events which are not currently considered important - but which we have no way of estimating the future importance of. One can continue to create countless counterfactual examples in this vein. My overall point is we cannot know what may be useful or even essential in the future, and knowledge should be preserved under the assumption that it is likely to be.

Historians frequently refer to this paradox - how everyday aspects of life are frequently not explicitly documented, since they're so obvious to the communities or communities of expertise that observe and carry them out. So it's actually incredibly important to preserve what seems like ephemera.

Hell we couldn't have AI training at all if we lacked the corpus of existing written literature - but there was no way any author could have anticipated this future utility more than a couple of decades ago.

1. If someone is acquiring books in bulk for bargain-bin prices and shredding them, they're books whose physical copies have essentially no market value and which, absent this buyer, were overwhelmingly headed for pulping or landfill anyway. Millions of books are destroyed every day.

Could one of these worthless looking books turn out to contain information historians care about in a 100 year? Sure. But that doesn't create an obligation for someone to pay to warehouse every extant copy forever. Physical Preservation has costs: space, cataloguing, handling, transportation etc. Archives and libraries have always had to make choices for this reason.

2. I'm not arguing that preservation has no value. The question is whether destroying a physical copy after digitizing it is a serious loss when talking about mass-produced printed material.

Was this the last surviving copy ? Is the information unavavilable in libraries, archives, other editions, scans, citations, contemporary works etc ? If not, nothing has been lost except one physical instance of a reproducible object.

Your film analogy worked a lot better because old film footage is often unique primary source material. A camera recording of a random brooklyn street in 1993 may literally be the only recording of those people, storefronts and circumstances. The nth printe dcopy of a technical manual is not analogous to that.

Believe it or not, what matters here is the message and access to the message, not the medium.

One could obviously reproduce films too.

Ultimately, you don't know how big N is, and that's what matters. Part of the problem is there is no transparency around this. The population of all books != the population of a specific book or set of books. Assuming N is large when you have basically zero information on specifics is foolish. These books might be just as rare as a film for which only one source exists you don't know.

They're books that are no longer in print. Doesn't mean there aren't a lot of copies around.

>Ultimately, you don't know how big N is, and that's what matters. Part of the problem is there is no transparency around this. The population of all books != the population of a specific book or set of books. Assuming N is large when you have basically zero information on specifics is foolish. These books might be just as rare as a film for which only one source exists you don't know.

All of this is frankly irrelevant. Books that you buy in bulk at barging bin prices are books that have essentially no market value and were going to the pulp or landfill anyway. Nobody has an obligation to spend money to preserve every extant copy of every book forever. Millions of books are destroyed everyday. Even libraries and archives make these choices. I was simply pointing out the film analogy worked better, but it doesn't change anything.

You realize "market value" isn't the only kind of value too, right? Even books that are completely obsolete can have inherent historical value insofar as they enrich our understanding of the past and how human beings used to live. Contemporary market value isn't everything. There are plenty of works of scholarly interest that wouldn't command nearly requisite value to a NYT bestseller when you adjust for scale. That doesn't mean these books aren't worth keeping or aren't intellectually important.

Also, these books presumably even have some perceived value, otherwise these companies wouldn't think they were relevant for training, and wouldn't be spending money to purchase and scan them in the first place. The whole premise is that these books are valuable enough such that training on them will make the models valuable and make paying customers line up for tokens. This is an inherent imputation of value to these works on the part of these companies. You can't say, simultaneously "these books are worthless" yet somehow, at the same time, "they are worth something for producing artificial intelligence". Your assumptions don't make any sense.

> They're books that are no longer in print. Doesn't mean there aren't a lot of copies around.

Sure, but there also could be limited copies around. We don't know. We won't know unless these companies are more transparent about exactly what they are buying and scanning. It's that simple. If it's foolish to assume there might be limited copies, it's equally foolish to assume they have plentiful copies. We simply don't know.

> Nobody has an obligation to spend money to preserve every extant copy of every book forever.

I don't think anyone is claiming that. People are bothered because they (in my mind, rightly) recognize that old books are a historical record of human accomplishment and have some amount of cultural value. Letting a handful of companies further plunder the collective output of humanity and now, potentially keep it locked on their servers in perpetuity is something that should make you upset if you have any inkling of interest in the history of humanity or human accomplishment and if you have any sliver of curiosity about these things. If all you care about is the present and getting better LLMs, sure, I guess I understand why you don't care, but then I also think you are very unwise and myopic.

> Millions of books are destroyed everyday.

So what? Millions of crimes are committed every day, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be bothered by the crimes we hear about. Billions of pollutants are spewed into the environment every day. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try to combat pollution. That's a pathetic attempt at justification. Also, there are clear distinctions between processes like libraries removing works they can no longer store and companies scooping up books for training and personal gain.

https://downtownbrown.substack.com/p/five-fallacies-ai-and-d...

It's not that individual companies buy all copies of a given book, but that there's more than one book scanning company, and they aren't sharing the scans with each other. The result: books that were rare but nevertheless easy to find for purchase (thanks to the internet) are now vanishing off of the market, becoming de facto no longer accessible to the public.

If anyone has an example, I’d love to hear it.

The distributed nature of the problem and the utter lack of transparency are huge factors here too.

Regardless I feel like they gotta figure this out for optics reasons. “So and so books are lost forever to Anthropic’s servers” is much more outrageous than “Anthropic is destroying a bunch of books that have other copies” imo.

Maybe the Bodleian Library at Oxford University should give all their rare books to AI companies to scan and destroy them since it is not a "big deal" anyway.

Except that when they did do a pilot with OpenAI to scan these rare books, [0] they did NOT destroy them. I wonder why?

[0] https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/services/research-partnerships...

Do you think there's no difference between the books curated at Oxford University and the crap that Amazon is buying?

It is common for academic books to have publication runs in the low three digits.

You may argue these books are not important. But how do we know if we fail to preserve it?

I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.

Is there evidence that they aren’t? All of the common works are already on libgen, if these books are worthless repetition they will contribute little to the training corpus, labs want high quality interesting texts and they have unlimited budget to spend on it. Paying $300 for something rare with millions of tokens of interesting and original text for training is definitely fucking worth it, spending $1,200 to get all the copies and block your competitors from getting it is most definitely worth it!

> I simply don't see why railing against the AI giants about this without also contributing significant effort into protecting these low-print-run books from getting jettisoned by university libraries makes any sense.

Do you think it would be OK to rail against for example, a genocide if I wasn’t substantially contributing to some effort to stop it? This sophistic (and uninteresting) bit of rhetoric boils down to: if youre not trying to fix it yourself, dont complain!

(reminder that one of the basic principles of a democratic society is that each person has some concern outside of their personal affairs)

This is happening because copyright means you can't scan these without destroying them as a format conversion.

No one's felt compelled to try and fix that so we can do this sort of digital archival and preservation, and copyright allows works to be frozen and undistributable because a claim might exist for decades without any actual use (I.e. the number of games which get stuck in legal limbo).

If the only desire is to sling mud at AI companies but not try and improve the legal situation, then it's worse then useless because there's no intent to stop it - in fact stopping it would remove a useful outrage tool.

The idea in the title here is point 1 of the blind leading the blind: it's illegal to scan and store these books without destroying them in many jurisdictions.

have you ever held and read an old book?

No, every popular book has been duplicated thousands of times. This is not the same thing as important. They're orthogonal. When an important book is popular, it is safe. When it is not, it is in danger. Only fools assume that important books are recognized often enough to become popular.

I do wonder who is running PR at the major AI companies, as they seem rather insensate to how they are perceived...

It would likewise earn goodwill from a lot of people.

Berne Convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention (182 parties)

TRIPS Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement (164 parties - part of WTO)

The United States can't make copyright weaker than what those agreements require without pulling out of the WTO.

The core of copyright law is about who has the right to redistribute a work. If I buy a print of a photograph, scan it and use that as my desktop image... I can do that. I cannot redistribute the scanned image, and if I was to sell the print later I should delete the scanned image.

Note that format shifting is covered under fair use... which is what training is taking place under. However, that doesn't mean that they can release that format shifted content... nor can then re-release the original work if they are retaining the format shifted content.

https://library.georgetown.edu/copyright/fair-use-reformatti...

    Under § 106 of the Copyright Law of the United States, the owner of the copyright in a work has the exclusive right to make copies of that work, unless an exception applies. When considering reformatting media, please note that individuals do not have an automatic right to reformat a work from one format to another. In order to legally convert media, your use must fall into one of the following categories:

    you own the copyright in the work,
    you have permission from the owner of the copyright, or
    you have done a fair use analysis and have determined that fair use applies

If their PR teams did have a response to these actions, it would be something to the effect of:

"would you rather china destroy all the books and gatekeep the knowledge?"

Here's another question: The exact reasoning for copyright is made clear in the constitution: "[the United States Congress shall have power] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."

What courts changed is failing to promote the progress of science and useful arts by destroying knowledge/art/books and access to those books, supposedly with the goal of maintaining market demand for those books. I mean this reasoning is so bad, so warped it could be used as James Bond villain humor.

Courts have failed to provide authors and inventors with exclusive rights, in fact they have destroyed a right authors effectively had. This decision goes against both the spirit and letter of the law, all because billionaires don't want to respect copyright anymore.

If you're going to do this, why have copyright at all? Can someone explain to me HOW you can explain that the constitution still supports this system?

But, of course, it gets worse. EU courts have decided the opposite, namely that without the author's permission you are not allowed to train an ML model on their texts. Ie. this becomes an additional right authors have, an additional thing authors can license (or not). Now that SOUNDS good, and you can bet the EU commission will be publishing about that. But it isn't good.

Of course the EU has demonstrated their usual do-nothing attitude. They have stated they are not going to do anything about people outside of the EU blatantly violating EU law, and let them profit inside the EU of violations of EU law, thereby destroying authors' income. As to the question why there is any need for EU law if you're not going to act on law violations ... no answer on that front.

To put it differently: why is chatgpt.com, claude.ai, gemini.google.com, ... not banned across the EU? Why are payments involving violating models allowed to go through, given that EU courts have sided with authors? What is the point of having EU laws at all?

But it's far worse: the EU commission is attempting to make their employees use a US model (chatGPT [2]), in violation of EU law, internally in their own organizations. Now from what I hear, they're failing at making people use it, WHILE paying US companies for illegal models.

I mean I hate what the US government has done, but the EU is far worse. They are officials, they are the institutions ... and their public claim to defend authors, their court judgements, their public stance ... is just an outright lie. I mean how else can you call this? 90% of the people involved here are lawyers, from the very top to the bottom rungs, all overwhelmingly lawyers. They know they are going against their own law, and doing it anyway. That is, at best, lying. The EU commission, even the courts and the EU's own bureaucracy will not follow the law internally, NOR are they making anyone else follow EU law!

The real effect of EU decisions: only Mistral, and other EU model providers are forbidden from, and punished for training on copyrighted data without permission. Everyone outside of the EU can just do it without permission and will not face any kind of consequences for that in the EU. EU companies (ie. hugging face) are hosting, for free, models in blatant violation of EU law.

Which is even worse than the US government stance in my opinion. EU has directly chosen for the worst possible of all combinations:

a) EU companies making ML models have to self-sabotage against their competition.

b) EU authors receive ZERO protection from the law. Not because the law doesn't support their case, but because the institutions whose only reason for existence is to enforce the law won't do their job. In fact THEY THEMSELVES violate EU authors rights.

Obviously, under these circumstances, AI model companies are going to outcompete musicians, authors, even movie studios. It's only a matter of time. And that is not a given, it is an explicit choice both the US and EU governments are making.

[1] https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/f0b8d4c3-51aa...

[2] in their source you can see what models they were likely using internally 2 years ago: https://github.com/openeuropa/gpt-at-ec-php-client

Overall , smells like propaganda. How many books on earth you can openly buy that has practical “knowledge” value , not just historical one , and exist only in one physical implementation ( book ) . There were numbers of initiatives for a decade to digitalize all valuable knowledge.

It seems the initiative was secretive for a different reason . Buying a single book not allows you to distribute the content of the book , hence 1.5 billions fines.

Usually I personally not on copyright people side , but in this case you clearly see the system functioning. Know knows how the book business will look like in 10 years , but now book publishers doing their job by brining ai companies to court

Using a few gas generators for a transitional period isn't great either, but effect of those is very temporary. I fear permanence in this individual deal with the devil made for speed and cost.

It's not bitcoin.

Much like the pushback we are seeing from the citizenry against things like Flock and AI datacenters, we can push _forward_ too by ensuring important institutions (legal or otherwise) remain funded

That doesn't mean I'm against that narrative; I'm a big supporter of shadow libraries and scanning every unscanned book. But connecting to the LLM narrative here seems opportunistic and populistic.

The previously struggling second hand bookseller in my town has upgraded their car from a 15 year old hatchback Renault to a brand new Range Rover. Some Canadian company has been buying any book he can provide them for the last year. Their quotes aren't by number of books, or even weight, but by volume. As in, they pay him by the shipping container, and he sends several of those a month.

I think it's reasonable to assume the books in this supply chain which aren't destroyed in digitisation are just pulped and sold to Procter & Gamble for toilet paper manufacturing. I can't see any other fate for Anthropic's second and third copies of The twelfth edition of Vera Lynn's 1980's memoir "We'll Meet Again".

I doubt that corporations of this scale do that extra kind of… book-keeping. They more than likely buy books by the pound.

At some point they’ll hit on data center water consumption as yet another reason to support the cause.

Really can't wait for this outrage cycle to finally die. There's a lot AI companies are doing wrong. The wording of Project Panama is really some villain-type shit. But if you stop and think about it, this is really not concerning. Like, at all.

0. In the Anglosphere, the British Library (UK and Ireland) and the US Library of Congress (USA) preserves all books published in their territories. So if Anthropic is pulling a 1984/Fahrenheit 451, "gating access to information", they are really doing a ridiculously bad job at it. I'm pretty certain similar depositories exist for other jurisdictions.

1. Rare does not automatically mean it has some obscure knowledge nor does it mean culturally/historically significant. The oldest book the news outlets could mention is a 1970s manual on soil mechanics (Guardian link in your sources). How "obscure" is the knowledge in there, you reckon? How culturally significant is that book? Odds are, a good chunk of that book is outdated knowledge at this point, useless for anything practical other than knowing what people in the 70s thought about soil mechanics. And for the latter, there are a bunch of other soil mechanics manuals from the 1970s lying around.

2. No, despite the admittedly cartoonishly villainous description of Project Panama, Anthropic is not out to get every single manual on soil mechanics from the 1970s out there. They just need to cover enough subject breadth in their training data set. Getting redundant copies is a waste of money. See also, point 0.

3. You argue a lot for the nostalgia and sentimentality of old books, which, okay, but that is hardly beside the point. Libraries and publishers destroy books at a greater scale than Project Panama when there's not enough demand for them. That's not an affront to history or culture just the consequence of economics (see also, point 0). Similarly, y'all outraged about old and second hand books being destroyed but odds are, they would've been trashed anyway even if Anthropic didn't get their hands on them. We've had all the time in the world for someone else to buy them to keep them from big bad Anthropic but no one did. I'm just happy for the booksellers who made some money out of this AI-infected timeline.

4. It's not like Anthropic is buying books from Dr. James Justin Sledge---books not covered by point 0 in other words---and chopping that up. The fact that one of their reported suppliers is "ISBNdb" should clue you in that they are interested in books from the ISBN era (and hence covered by point 0). Fact is, it's a terrible investment to "gate knowledge" from the really rare and old and culturally significant books. They are über expensive and for what? Even more useless is the AI trained on those books! Imagine asking ChatGPT how to cook a large squid and it answers in the style of Thomas Hobbes.

Heck even YouTube should be legally obligated to preserve videos, given how they now hold the largest visual documentation of human history.

I do think book copyright law needs a ton of work but I think most folks are simply taking their bias against AI and creating hyperbolic scenarios. I am sure there are some gems in the lot and I am equally certain they may be scanning dupes of the same material but even at scale I have a hard time seeing the significance. Most of these published work in the last 60 years is absolutely junk garbage. The good stuff usually has a lot longer run so more volume in circulation. You can go pick up lots of books that are 100+ years old for a couple bucks or cheaper because this stuff has no value.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/10/appeals-court-ru...

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

I therefore feel the same way about Google Books that how I felt when I learned that What.cd went down: that I don't gain or lose anything anyway because I never had access to begin with, and that by not making it 100% publicly accessible you're asking for the data to one day disappear forever.

I'd be worried about how much they'd be charging for access once they had the monopoly on so many rare books.

It's the logic of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, which prefers that no one benefit rather than Google see any benefit.

The copyright owner must make new copies of the work available; the price must be no greater than the original price (not inflation adjusted). And if they fail to do so, anyone may produce copies and escrow the original price (less the cost of production) for collection by the copyright holder.

That means that orphan works are effectively in the public domain. Calculus professors can ask students to get the cheaper 2nd edition, not the latest 22nd edition. And a company like Google could make scanned works available in their entirety for a small amount of money for each work. And the copyright holder still gets their end, without having to arrange a printing or hold stock.

What happens to limited editions of print runs? Can I not make a run of 200 prints anymore because the 201st will be something that someone could request?

Does a musician have to license any song they made to anyone who asks? Can they refuse to license a song to some organization they disagree with and not have it fall into the orphan works category?

---

Amending copyright to the way you describe requires a renegotiation of the TRIPS agreement ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRIPS_Agreement ) with all the nations of the WTO (or withdrawing from the WTO).

I suppose the rule could make reference to a rival good, i.e. the 22nd and 23rd editions of the calculus textbook. It should not be reasonable for the publisher to make the 22nd edition only available for $1,000, and the 23rd edition for $250. But that definition would invite many lawsuits and chilling litigation in general. A clear definition based on the historic price is much simpler.

You can still number your limited runs, and your limited runs still have increased numismatic value over some other reproduction.

I don't envision licensing of performance rights in this system, just recordings or reproductions.

Is this a reduction of the rights granted by copyright? Yes, intentionally so. It is stripping copyright holders of the right not to copy, against the interests of society in granting that copyright in the first place.

It keeps about 50% of the books submitted. The other half are donated

AIUI registration only allows for additional penalties during infringement claims.

It's a very serious issue, very well known to the people with the connections and power to affect it.

> [ it wouldn't ] make a ton of people vote for you to get re-elected

The tons of people are moved by the media, people are oblivious to the tricks of that trade, for the same reasons, obviously. In other words, this issue isn't something that happens to slip below the radar, it's kept stealthy by well organized engineering and considerable expense.

> and it won't create a ton of new jobs

Nothing ever creates tons of new jobs, the "tons" are reserved for promises and other useless noise.

Big companies will read up the books and make their AI recite them from memory, but Archive.org was sued for renting one book on an exclusive basis (unless one would return, another wouldn't be able to rent)

No, this is what they were doing before, but they explicitly started lending out "unlimited" copies, which is why they got sued.

> The crux of IA's first factor argument is that an organization has the right under fair use to make whatever copies of its print books are necessary to facilitate digital lending of that book, so long as only one patron at a time can borrow the book for each copy that has been bought and paid for. See Oral Arg. Tr. 31:10-15. But there is no such right, which risks eviscerating the rights of authors and publishers to profit from the creation and dissemination of derivatives of their protected works. See 17 U.S.C. §§ 106(1), (2). IA's wholesale copying and unauthorized lending of digital copies of the Publishers' print books does not transform the use of the books, and IA profits from exploiting the copyrighted material without paying the customary price. The first fair use factor strongly favors the Publishers.

> In this case, there is a "thriving ebook licensing market for libraries" in which the Publishers earn a fee whenever a library obtains one of their licensed ebooks from an aggregator like OverDrive. Pls.' 56.1 ¶¶ 577-578. This market generates at least tens of millions of dollars a year for the Publishers. Id. ¶¶ 170, 172. And IA supplants the Publishers' place in this market. IA offers users complete ebook editions of the Works in Suit without IA's having paid the Publishers a fee to license those ebooks, and it gives libraries an alternative to buying ebook licenses from the Publishers. Indeed, IA pitches the Open Libraries project to libraries in part as a way to help libraries avoid paying for licenses. See Pls.' 56.1 ¶ 383 (presentation IA gave to libraries asserting that pairing with IA means that "You Don't Have to Buy It Again!"); id. ¶ 382 (different presentation promising that the Open Libraries project "ensures that a library will not have to buy the same content over and over, simply because of a change in format"). IA thus "brings to the marketplace a competing substitute" for library ebook editions of the Works in Suit, "usurp[ing] a market that properly belongs to the copyright-holder."

No, it was not, even supported by the quotes you pulled. Libraries right now, with publisher blessing, offer all manner of controlled digital lending. The suit was because IA did it buy undercutting the publishers copy rights to that legal market. Had IA simply done what every other library has done to provide controlled digital lending, there would be no suit.

In contrast to this, the e-book lending practiced by most libraries with publisher blessing involves the library purchasing special library-specific e-book licenses from the publisher. These licenses contain various contractual restrictions, such as the library having to re-purchase the e-book after a certain amount of time or after a certain number of borrows.

So making it seem as if all "controlled digital lending" is not allowed under current law, even under the description you give, is not that simple.

> “At bottom, [the Internet Archive’s] fair use defense rests on the notion that lawfully acquiring a copyrighted print book entitles the recipient to make an unauthorized copy and distribute it in place of the print book, so long as it does not simultaneously lend the print book,” Judge John G. Koeltl of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan wrote. “But no case or legal principle supports that notion. Every authority points the other direction.” [0]

[0]: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-innovation/teaching...

> I therefore feel the same way about Google Books that how I felt when I learned that What.cd went down: that I don't gain or lose anything anyway because I never had access to begin with, and that by not making it 100% publicly accessible you're asking for the data to one day disappear forever.

Can you still search the restricted parts? If so there's still value to it: it helps you identify the book so you do an inter-library loan to get at the full content. Sure, it's not frictionless, but I wouldn't be all or nothing about it.

At the time it was obvious and innovative but over time it was clear Google was establishing a technical precedent to corrode what libraries have the power to do. I'm hoping we can continue to do the good work but it's exhausting.

It's great they did this, but the Google that is today cannot be trusted with data of public value anymore.

Book scans, secreted away, are worthless to the public.

This doesn’t incentivize them to be good stewards of this data and making anything in the public domain available. It incentivizes less access to the source material, having to blindly trust their tools, and is effectively automating plagiarism.

Can you do anything else with the book? What are its costs for storage in a way that retains the value of the book? If the assets of the warehouse are sold to another company (see also https://paizo.com/blog/paizo-restructuring-a-difficult-updat... ), what are your obligations for the format shifted copy that you retain?

These questions imply that there's a liability that exists when retaining the original that has little value to the company. And they (the books) aren't assets that can be resold.

It's easier (and cheaper), has no ongoing costs for physical storage, and answers those questions without creating legal entanglements for the future company.

https://btaa.org/library/programs-and-services/book-search/f...

> Will scanning harm the books?

> No. Google developed innovative technology to scan the content without harming the books. Any book deemed too fragile will not be scanned by Google, but may be treated by expert library staff. Once scanned, all print volumes are returned to the library collections.

That was an inherently different goal (borrow the books from the library, scan them, and return them) than the Bartz v. Antrophic ruling.

https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/...

> Storage and searchability are not creative properties of the copyrighted work itself but physical properties of the frame around the work or informational properties about the work. See Texaco, 802 F. Supp. at 14 (physical), aff’d, 60 F.3d at 919; Google, 804 F.3d at 225 (informational); Sony Corp. of Am. v. Universal City Studios, Inc. (“Sony Betamax”), 464 U.S. 417, 447 (1984) (rightful interests). In Texaco, the court reasoned that if a purchased scientific journal article had been copied “onto microfilm to conserve space, this might [have been] a persuasive transformative use.” 802 F. Supp. at 14 (Judge Pierre Leval), aff’d, 60 F.3d at 919 (reducing “bulk[ ]” “might suffice to tilt the first fair use factor in favor of Texaco if these purposes were dominant“). In Google Books, the court reasoned that a print-to-digital change to expose information about the work was transformative. Google, 804 F.3d at 225 (Judge Pierre Leval). And, in Sony Betamax, the Supreme Court held that making a recording of a television show in order to instead watch it at a later time was copying but did not usurp any rightful interest of the copyright owner. 464 U.S. at 447, 455. Important to the Supreme Court’s reasoning was the expectation that most such copiers would not distribute the permanent copies of the work. Finally, in A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., our court of appeals recognized the reasoning just explained, and therefore rejected by contrast a digitization effort that was touted as space-shifting but in fact resulted in the multiplication of copies shared with outsiders through a file-sharing service. 239 F.3d 1004, 1019 (9th Cir. 2001), aff’g in this part 114 F. Supp. 2d 896, 912–13, 915–16 (N.D. Cal. 2000) (Judge Marilyn Hall Patel) (citing Sony Betamax and Texaco).

> Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others).

---

The AI training isn't borrowing from libraries and returning from libraries. Instead, it is buying a book, format shifting, and retaining that format shifted version from its own use. The company can't do anything else with the book once they've format shifted it. They can't donate it and they can't resell it. In that light, destructively scanning the book is the best option. There is no value in trying to non-destructively scan it because otherwise all it would do is sit in a warehouse and cost money to pay for storage of something they can't sell.

Perhaps that's an important distinction here, I was really just trying to explain what I thought the commenter was trying to say. Calm down with the copy pasta walls.

But I still think that AI companies could make a very similar argument to the one Google made in your copy-pasta. The laziness I refereed to earlier is the fact that they haven't even tried. They could donate the books afterwards which would go a long way towards helping that argument in court.

First, in today's environment people will state AI hallucinations as fact or "google it yourself" as the reference. If someone doesn't know where to find that information they're left with the "someone on the net said XYZ".

Secondly, I'm not always certain that if I do provide a link to a large document that people will find the relevant section in there. And second and a halfly, if someone comes back to it in a year or two or five that the link will still be live. I've had situations in the past where I've provided a link and then the domain changes hands and the new owners of the site put up a retroactive robots.txt and make it inaccessible on the wayback machine.

---

The question for an AI company that can't return, sell, or donate the material after it has been scanned - are they then to pay to store it in a warehouse indefinitely?

After they've format shifted the content and retained the format shifted content for continued use in training, it becomes at least a very gray area to donate the original.

And even if the books were scanned like Google Books did, and they could donate them to libraries - the libraries don't want those books. These aren't rare books in that people would expect you to wear cotton gloves while handling them... they're books that have mostly disappeared from availability.

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... provides an example of what is being seen in a used book store:

> I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades.

Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 is technically a rare book. https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...

If you had a copy of it, I would challenge you to find a library that would accept it as a donation.

In the event that you wanted to read a copy of it, there is a copy of it in the Library of Congress. https://search.catalog.loc.gov/instances/b220c9bd-63ad-5a8b-...

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/19/nx-s1-5936438/why-tech-compan...

NPR's Juana Summers speaks with 404 Media cofounder and reporter Emanuel Maiberg about his investigation into a shipment of rare books which ended up at an Amazon AI training warehouse.

...

MAIBERG: So I think people obviously have a very negative reaction to anyone destroying books in large quantities. I think people hear the term rare book, and they're imagining a first edition of "Oliver Twist."

SUMMERS: Right. Yeah.

MAIBERG: Or something like this. That is not the case. A rare book is most likely a book that was never printed in large quantities because it is about a niche subject. It is what is called vanity publishing, where someone self-publishes a book. It's an instruction manual for a product that's no longer available. It's really things like this that people at the moment don't really care about. They don't have high emotional value. But we don't necessarily know what we might find valuable in the future.

and that you're arguing that a library could accept a donation.

From Bartz v. Anthropic which was mostly about the pirated copies, but included some information about the destructive scanning, format shifting, and use as training as fair use.

> Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others).

> ...

> As a result, Anthropic’s format-change from print library copies to digital library copies was transformative under fair use factor one. Anthropic was entitled to retain a copy of these works in a print format. It retained them instead in a digital format, easing storage and searchability. And, the further copies made therefrom for purposes of training LLMs were themselves transformative for that further reason, as above.

Note especially the second sentence in the first paragraph. "The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company."

If the physical copy was shown, shared, or sold outside of the company the fair use defense would likely be much weaker than it currently is.

After the company has format shifted the original and retained the digital version, it cannot share or donate the original back to some other organization.

A library might take the books. It would be a legal liability for an AI company to give those books away and weaken the fair use claim that it stands on from Bartz v. Anthropic. The destruction of the original enhances the fair use claim.

From the ruling:

> For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.

> The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital.

There are no surplus copies when the original is destroyed.

They never should have been trusted in the first place.

I don't think they were overcome. As far as I remember Google couldn't make the books available so they abandoned the project. They possess the scans (if they didn't delete them) but they won't be made public.

Info on where to send books not yet in their collection: https://help.archive.org/help/how-do-i-make-a-physical-donat...

Mobile apps to determine if they need a book: https://help.archive.org/help/donate-books-app-for-ios-and-a...

Web app: https://archive.org/want/?mode=donation_book

For example, I donated a copy of Systems Bible (out of print, hard to find imho) and paid for it to jump the digitization queue (https://archive.org/details/systemsbiblebegi0000gall/). The original book will remain stored as a physical backup. It's not fully publicly available of course due to copyright (it will eventually be made public by the Internet Archive once its copyright expires ~2084 and it enters the public domain), which is where shadow libraries|archives like Anna's Archive and Z-Library fill the gap.

If you have rare books you would like digitized, archived, and distributed, I am very interested in providing assistance.

While the hard copy is a bit pricy for my shelf of curious books, it's also available on kindle. https://www.amazon.com/SYSTEMANTICS-SYSTEMS-BIBLE-John-Gall-...

I do not recommend Kindle books, as you don't own them and Amazon is closing any DRM loopholes, but I understand that if you must have access to a resource, they are a solution. I'll noodle on wiring up a Kindle so it can step through pages programmatically controlled for CCD capture and OCR using vision LLMs.

Kindle update toughens DRM and ends Libby loophole - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49388279 - August 2026

This is was what ended up spinning up AWS as a business.

I dislike the idea of destroying rare books--but how rare? A digital copy has a lot more benefit.

Nevermind that they do that because those books aren't being borrowed and no one wants to buy them. Destroying books to destroy knowledge is bad, destroying books because no one wants them or there are ample copies, _especially_ when those books go on to live forever as a digital copy, is a completely different story.

It boggles my mind that of all places, here on HN, people can't understand that. The knowledge is not destroyed, only the physical vessel.

I wasn't even making an unusual or particularly strong statement

Im going to try and be patient and explain my position. I just feel that actions that are destructive should always be seen through a lens of suspicion.

IE, lets destroy this wood to reduce the chance of wildfires. Ok, well why that wood? we sure there arent other interests at play? Ie a carpark wanting to be built by a local authority?

As you become older and witness large acts occur due to unclear scheming, you start to become sensitive towards destructive acts, feeling there should be a lens cast over it.

Maybe Im just paranoid.

Sure I can understand there must be tons of books that are not needed, but books, are object that include native function that IN the right context becomes priceless and hence should be treated with a degree of concern.

Yes destroying a book is in my opinion identical to a book burning.

One day there will be no hard copies, the digital books are hence vulnerable to patches, whether its due to a new political movement or a sudo abled hamster running on a keyboard... and if that occurs information will be permanently lost.

I would have thought a HN user understand well the importance of backups.

I dont want to sound mean, perhaps you also support keeping some hard copies as backups, but Im just explaining my concern.

To be honest I think everything I am saying is just common sense, I was just making a joke earlier about the architects deciding to do this because they had a bad tuesday.

I'll admit I have less concern with (every) digital copy being altered and if we assume a future where all computing is completely locked down and governments have the ability to reach in a tweak anything then yes, we are screwed. But we are screwed if we allow that to happen even if some of us have squirreled away physical books. In that techno-hell (of completely locked down computing with no open options) then some of use will have "illegal" computers that still do what we want and I see that as no different than keeping physical copies.

Put simply: Preserving the original does not require a physical substrate (or at least one made of paper, obviously computers run on physical hardware).

Good to hear alternative opinions though

I genuinely don't understand how it's possible for someone to type that out in all sincerity. Have you ever held a physical book?

…Does it really need to explain why people would be up in arms over the physical destruction of physical art?

It's common practice to cut the spine & binding off a book, scan the loose pages, & drop the rubber-banded loose pages in a box somewhere. The book still exists, just without its binding.

Clearly that makes assumptions about the function of government and the complacency of copyright holders.

some form of mandatory deposit law has existed since 1790 in the US. other countries have similar laws. there is a very good chance the government already has a copy of anything that has been copyrighted

The rhetoric on this topic is reminiscent of the rhetoric regarding data centers: some noxious combination of misinformation, misunderstanding, and sensationalism, wielded against technological progress.

LLMs have topped out in terms of language fluency. You’re not going to get a smarter model with 250 trillion tokens than with 25 trillion tokens. There are still other gains to be made in the LLM/LRM space, but they don’t require ripping up rare books.

And they’re doing it destructively because it’s cheaper. That’s it. They absolutely could scan nondestructively. They’re trillion-dollar companies, and they do this in a shitty way to save pennies.

I do not know much about Anna’s. Is it Chinese or is this just one of many worldwide helpers?

* download and publish a book as an individual -> 100% lifetime jail + 10x your whole lifetime earnings/revenue - Aaron Swartz

* download and publish a book as a company -> fine 1% of revenue

* scan and publish a book as an individual -> legal issues, 100x fines of your yearly 50k donations

* scan and "publish/train" a book as a company -> okay, lets ban chinese models, they are distilling your model

The insanity of attempting to prevent AI learning (which is a direct consequence of the nature of observable information) because of the myth of intellectual property is the main driver of this type of behavior.

I wish people cared 25 years ago. Unwanted books in boxes are everywhere. Its a false hysteria. You can still get any book you want, digitizing is the best bet for more readership.

- Reinforcing outdated, disproved or otherwise incorrect information.

- Reinforcing outdated forms of communication e.g purple prose.

You could counter both by giving more weight to recent text and I suppose the extra data may help for tracing references and the evolution of ideas through history. If this is what they are resorting to it does feel more like "marginal gains" territory rather than ASI imminent territory

I’ll leave

https://old.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/1vszifd/what_...

Just publicize a rare books vault where you put the older editions that aren’t in a lot of library catalogs. Use non-destructive scanning for those.

Align yourself with the image of safeguarding something. It seems like a no-brainer given various themes I’ve been hearing in criticisms of these companies.

Maybe the hope was to just bury the book destruction under the rug, but the cat is out of the bag. Publicizing a state-of-the-art rare books preservation archive is now a good move.

Tech tends to love associating itself with a classical tradition or something. Name it after the library of Alexandria. It would be a huge cultural loss if that were to burn down again. Thank God for our big AI companies that keep the archive intact.

Actually, I assume it would be separate archives, since I assume there’s a something of an arms race in getting training data that competitors don’t have, but really, who would complain that there are multiple archives? That sounds like a good thing. And what big AI company would want to be the odd one out for not running an archive?

A book vault would still be useful for out-of-copyright works, but this would only cover a (probably relatively small) portion. Also, I'm not sure how easy it is to reliably determine copyright at scale, so they might just decide that it's not worth it.

At this point my only hope is that in the long run these scans make it to the public somehow (leaks, copyright changes/expiration, whatever), where they can then be accessed and preserved by everybody. Then we could have our true digital library of Alexandria.

I’m not a lawyer, but I would guess the theory behind the destruction is to guarantee that they are authorized under fair use to have and to use their digital copy. Imagine a situation in which someone else becomes the owner or is using the original. If you destroy it, that becomes impossible. If that’s part of the constraints, then a vault, rather than a library, could be a key distinction.

You might be confusing the need for an original work that draws upon another to be “transformative,” in order to not violate copyright, with the notion of “fair use,” which allows scanning something you own for your own personal use.

Not sure even rare books will dig these big AI companies out of the hole they're digging for themselves.

"Here, every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company. This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one), and, of course, more transformative than those uses rejected in Napster (where the number went up by “millions” of copies shared for free with others)."

"For the print library copies that Anthropic purchased and then converted into digital library copies, Anthropic already enjoyed entitlement to keep the copies in its library. The purpose of the copying was to keep them in its library but with more favorable storage and searchability properties. Copying the entire work was exactly what this purpose required. There was no surplus copying. The source copy was destroyed.

The third fair use factor favors fair use for the purchased library copies converted from print to digital."

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 787 F. Supp. 3d 1007 (N.D. Cal. 2025). https://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/califo...

Old books shouldn't simply vanish. That is history, art, authorial creation. Once the last copy gets crisped, it is lost.

I think books will exist but they will be written with the help of AI.

The context will still be a human mind behind the words in the book.

But the problem is real. Even if these books aren't needed by anyone right now, them digitization in a single copy that end up behind seven locks at a corporation is not great, because AI doesn't replace the original. You can't to ask a neural net to give you a exact copy of a page from that book. So yeah, the post dramatizes a bit, but the point are valid. We need open digital archives.

"Paint a picture" is apt.

"... like AI companies are some movie villains burning paintings so no one can see them. but in reality they just cut the canvas off the frames because it's cheaper and faster to photocopy. Most of these paintings have been collecting dust in galleries for decades and nobody needs them."

That's the problem. I tried the other day to find the verbatim quote from one of the Gabriel García Márquez's books - a single effing sentence and I nearly lost my mind - every LLM would be like "this is a copyrighted material and I can't share it verbatim". WTF? These books are widely known, published in many languages, and yet no amount of money spent on tokens can give me the exact fucking sentence, just like the author intended? Really? I need to find, buy, download and search through the actual book to quote something that Márquez wrote at some point? What is even worse is when the LLM just outright lies to you, giving you the quote, but slightly rephrased.

And about what topic have I heard more complaints in the last 15 years (although the latter topic is just a few months old)?

Why is that?

If you say that I'm indeed wrong, and the latter one IS indeed much more important, then please tell me why? What is wrong with me then?

first they came for cookbooks, but i was no chef so i said nothing. second they came for handicraft, but i do not toil with fabrics or glue. next they came for homesteading, but i loathe the outdoors life. after, they came for biography, memoirs, and letters, but i am bored by the dead. finally, they came for my own little little interest, but nobody was left who appreciated books, so they too were ripped to shreds.

> Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books). Anthropic created its own catalog of bibliographic metadata for the books it was acquiring. It acquired copies of millions of books, including of all works at issue for all Authors. Anthropic may have copied portions of Authors’ books on other occasions, too — such as while copying book reviews, academic papers, internet blogposts, or the like for its central library. And, Anthropic’s scanning service providers may have copied Authors’ print books along the way to delivering the final digital copies to Anthropic. But neither side here specifically raises legal issues implicated by any such copies. Nor will this order

Also the summary:

> To summarize the analysis that now follows, the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. And, the digitization of the books purchased in print form by Anthropic was also a fair use but not for the same reason as applies to the training copies. Instead, it was a fair use because all Anthropic did was replace the print copies it had purchased for its central library with more convenient space-saving and searchable digital copies for its central library — without adding new copies, creating new works, or redistributing existing copies.However, Anthropic had no entitlement to use pirated copies for its central library. Creating a permanent, general-purpose library was not itself a fair use excusing Anthropic’s piracy.

https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar...

(<- that's what propaganda does by definition)

e.g.

> but ethically, it’s an extremely serious crime against humanity.

Who are you that you consider it a serious crime against humanity? What are you a saint?

> Knowledge is permanently monopolized on private servers.

Throughout human history, it's the knowledge/info that provide one with wealth and advantage over others.

With the author's logic, every single private knowledge the author is not sharing is an extremely serious crime against humanity.

The logic of the writing is not correct.

Provide more context if you want a better feedback not whataboutism.

You are twisting my words with whataboutism. Stop digressing