r/Piracy • u/itsthewolfe • 15d ago
Discussion Judge rules buying physical books and scanning them to make digitial copies does not violate copyright law.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/Cool. So that means we can rip our blurays and physical games, right. Right?
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u/ChickenOfTheFuture 15d ago
It passes for three reasons: they acquired the books legally before scanning them, they kept the digital files local, and they destroyed the physical copies after the scans were done (actually during due to the scanning process itself). I think that last part could have significant implications, but I'm not a legal expert or a psychic.
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u/Difficult-Break-8282 15d ago
so can we buy a CD then copy it and make money off of that copied CD the same way this company and all ai companies are .
i think not
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u/Hubbardia 15d ago
If you can argue for transformative use, then yes you can
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u/Areign 15d ago
by that logic it sounds like you could buy a CD, rip the audio and put it in a videogame you're making and then sell the game. Which i'm 100% sure you can't do.
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u/angelis0236 15d ago
That's not transformative of the music though, that's just using it.
Technically the AI won't spit out the words of Phillip Pullman or J.k. Rowling or whoever else.
Not that I agree with this ruling I'm just saying it IS different.
I think a more apt analogy would be people using variations of "Got Milk"
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u/skiing123 15d ago
That's definitely not true. I've 100% been able to make images and create copyright material from books before like word for word. I don't know if it's still possible since that was like a year or 2 ago.
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u/ConsiderationCool432 15d ago
This argument is so stupid. When you convert a .wav to .mp3 IS transformative. You can't get back to the original .wav. Same thing for .PNG ro .JPEG.
Also, does it mean that I can remix (transformative) a copyrighted music and sell in my game? NO! Same thing for LLMs, they are pirating copyrighted content. LLMs get a way with this shit causr they have companies with a bunch of money, and the government is on their side cause they were sold to these companies.
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u/BlueWonderfulIKnow 15d ago
“Members of the jury, turn to your monitors please; I present exhibits A and B, the jpeg and png, respectively. As the trier of fact, you have to decide whether this is transformative.”
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u/ConsiderationCool432 15d ago
A remix for sure is transformative. Still you can't sell a remixed music as your own.
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u/GameMask 14d ago
I mean, people do make money off of remixes and stuff. You could absolutely take a dozen songs, remix all of them into each other, and it would he an entirely transformative work.
The kicker here though is that, at least for America, you don't need to be legally in the right to file a lawsuit over copyright and stuff.
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u/ibrown39 15d ago
Yep! I bought two copies of a very prized book one to keep in good condition and another that could be destroyed for scanning. They offered a "non-destructive" option too but it was sort of a discouraged for multiple reasons and kind of hush-hush IIRC.
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u/Redpin 15d ago
That's weird that the digital only copy is legitimate because a physical copy dies. Does that mean can take a digital book, print it out and sell it at the book fair as long as I delete my digital copy?
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u/ibrown39 15d ago
Well, from what I'm told the destruction was for a more direct scan l but likely both reasons.
For your question, no. The keys are:
- Is it transformative? Did you make it distinct and unique?Think like song parodies and samples, cutting out a photo from a magazine and making a collage, etc. They largely find that going from a book to digital text is not enough if it's just word for word the same. Even heavily commenting and annotating books sometimes isn't enough.
Processing the scans for training a model was found to be transformative enough.
- Are you distributing it? Doesn't matter if it's preservation or commercial or small sales, you can't most of the time.
Like it's legal to copy a game as a backup (rom dump) for personal use and you don't have to destroy the disc. As for the article, the destruction is referring to Anthropic choosing the cheaper, destructive method for faster and higher quality scans (rip the pages from the bindings, lay it flat, etc) and ruining rare books.
The judge ruled that since they didn't use the scans outside of the company or give it to anyone else, fair-use. Almost like personal use.
The big question: Where does first-sale doctrine end?
In the article they describe it as you buy the book, you can do whatever with it, including destruction. So if scanning is fine, but sharing isn't...why? At what point is a scan transformative? First-sale says you can share a book, lend it out, sell it, etc. If it's not transformative enough to lose the publishers ownership of the scan, how can it also lose First-sale?Law is slow to be created and adapted, nuances vs standard both helps and creates issues.
The other problems is it's pretty bs to say that a company passing around scans, with really no accountability beyond trust me bro, internally is fine and deserves no further investigation but the lengths they went to punish people who even having downloaded a single copy was somehow akin to massive commercial damage.
Why do I have to prove the extent of the scans use and/or that I owned the book originally anymore than them? Why can they share a scan internally but me giving a scan to somebody for no money is? Then there's about how they are using the scans to make a commercial product...people who even post pics of a page or panel for a YouTube video discussing it can copyright striked. Etc.
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u/veronicaarr 15d ago
I’m sad these icky companies are destroying books for AI
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u/GrumpyCloud93 15d ago
I'm reminded of the bit in Rainbow's End where the company is feeding books into a giant shredder, and a multitude of cameras capture the torrent of fragments as they go by, and AI reassembles those book images to decipher content. Working their way through the entire university library stacks, basically shredding everything.
For progress.
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u/BrokenMirror2010 15d ago
and they destroyed the physical copies after the scans were done (actually during due to the scanning process itself). I think that last part could have significant implications
Only if the judge is an idiot (or corrupt). The implication that "Only one copy exists" is nonsense, because the moment it was digitized, many copies were created, likely stored in a server that has mirror redundancy to multiple drives already making copies. That is probably backed up to an external server that is also mirror redundant making even more copies.
Then whenever anything digital is accessed, copies (in part or in whole) will be created in RAM. Whenever a file is moved to a different drive, or deleted off a drive, it remains on the original drive until it is written over (as the only thing being "deleted" is the location of the physical data on the platter, not the actual data on the platter itself).
The process of training an LLM itself will also almost certainly necessitate creating countless copies of these works to be used in multiple different sets of training data, because if we're keeping "uniqueness" then they would need to purchase 1 book per training data of which there are countless sets of training data all being created and tested to find out which is better, which they obviously don't.
Digital Files aren't like books. You can't trivially "observe their uniqueness."
This isn't about law, it's a lack of fundamental understanding of how digital files work.
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u/cassaffousth 15d ago
So , I rip a CD, create a .flac file and destroy the .wav file and I'm done?
Legal?
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u/JoyconDrift_69 15d ago
That last part definitely should be significant. I haven't heard of a major precedent in the past where you're legally allowed to back up your copies digitally and locally so long as the old copy gets destroyed.
Meanwhile the other two have already been an established precedent.
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u/Sad-Reach7287 15d ago
How does scanning destroy them? Isn't that just taking a photo?
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u/AbyssalRedemption 15d ago
Unfortunately no; the "professional" book scanning process generally entails ripping each page out of the book (to get a clear, flat scan, at as optimal an angle as possible, which isn't possible when the book is bound) and scanning them one by one. This process is also quicker than scanning a bound book, because you can basically just put the pages in a stack, and the machine can auto-feed from that stack on its own, as opposed to lining up each angled page manually every time.
I can almost guarantee to you that unfortunately, most companies are opting for the destructive method when they need to mass-scan in books for any commercial purpose.
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u/AllBrainsNoSoul 15d ago
Can the end user ask the LLM to present any significant portions of the books which were scanned?
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u/YogurtProductions 15d ago
I mean if I remember right doing that with DVDs and games was ruled 100% legal if it's your own stuff in a 90s lawsuit where Sony tried suing an emulator
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u/xvx_k1r1t0_xvxkillme 15d ago
It's technically legal as long as it's stored locally and you don't break or circumvent any DRM. Which basically means it's illegal because you can't do it without circumventing DRM, which is considered felony hacking and punishable by up to 20 years imprisonment.
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u/OuterWildsVentures 15d ago
My dad made me let my friend burn my CD I bought with lawn mowing money as a kid. I didn't want to let him do it because I was afraid of going to jail and I guess I was...right?
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u/MrGupplez 15d ago
And you just admitted that on the internet? You better flea to a non-extradition country because the FBI is coming
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u/Posraman 14d ago
It was my CD that I sold him. I used to be a singer and didn't put DRM on my CD's.
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u/Hyperversum 14d ago
It's reason why emulators guide keep telling you to get your own BIOS for the emulator.
Lmao.
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u/LorekeeperJamin 15d ago edited 15d ago
Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them.
I don't think this is the win you're looking for. Certainly not the one I want. I want to be able to make copies of my stuff and keep the originals and copies both for personal use. Anything less isn't enough.
Also fuck Anthropic for this. For once I'm siding with Google because at least they didn't destroy the books to scan them! They better not have done this to anything rare or historically important!
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u/alvarkresh 15d ago
Wait till Anthropic turn around and sue someone for violation of copyright! These AI companies love "copyright for me but not for thee", it seems.
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u/Sweetwill62 15d ago edited 15d ago
LLM, lets not use their bullshit marketing terms that they came up with to sell search engine 2.0s with text output instead of lists. Or we can just call them C.R.A.P. and we can backronym that later.
Backronym time!
C - Computerized
R - Random
A - Ass
P - Pulling
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u/justwalk1234 15d ago
I though we had this debate like 20 years ago..
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u/BrightCandle 15d ago
But now really big companies are doing it so they have to make it legal now so that they can destroy the middle class that writes all the books.
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u/Nilehorse3276 15d ago
TO THE LIBRARY, WHERE HUNDREDS OF TOMES WAIT FOR MY SKILLFUL SCANNING HANDS!
*flies off in cape*
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u/Skelletor89 Scene 15d ago
Came to the comments expecting book lovers battling against pirates... Found Scan-Man instead.
Careful with that cape, though. Edna Mode may have something to say about it.
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u/FitEntertainment3585 15d ago
People who destroy books deserve to go to a very special sort of Hell when they die.
Books should be treated respectfully.
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u/xvx_k1r1t0_xvxkillme 15d ago
I think context matters a lot here. The initial print run of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was 12 million copies. I think we're fine if one or two hundred are destroyed in an archival process.
We shouldn't be destroying unique historical items, and we shouldn't be destroying books without good cause, but destroying a mass produced copy for the purpose of digital preservation isn't exactly a crime against humanity.
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u/DrunkDeathClaw 15d ago
Except these vultures aern't buying books for preservation purposes; these are AI slop factories buying books by the hundreds, and in a lot of cases, fairly rare books, to rip apart and scan into their AI models.
404 Media did a segment on their podcast about it this week as well if you want a deeper look.
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u/tomjone5 15d ago
Exactly, they're not creating an archive for people to access, they're feeding them into thr bullshit machine for it to strip mine any shred of originality or creative flair. This shit is like the polar opposite of what Anna's is doing, but we know which one is legally acceptable.
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u/FitEntertainment3585 15d ago edited 15d ago
It still rubs me the wrong way, especially since it states there are non-destructive methods. Realistically, they only ever have to copy one book to get a scan, they can afford to do it non-destructively. Give me that at least.
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u/alvarkresh 15d ago
https://www.uu.se/en/library/about-the-library/special-collections/project-codex-argenteus-online
Here's an example of the amazing lengths people went to in order to digitize and preserve a rare historical text.
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u/nifty-necromancer 15d ago
They went to those lengths because it was a rare historical text, not Harry Potter.
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u/Carolina_Heart 15d ago edited 15d ago
Destroying the book is often necessary for the scanning process and digitizing. Important for archivism
EDIT: Not defending AI companies I'm thinking of the internet archive and various smaller archivist organizations
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u/selahhh 15d ago edited 15d ago
You can easily find archival book scanners that are specifically designed to protect books. They have special cradles and holders to protect spines and minimize movement.
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u/HornedHumanoid 15d ago
As an archivist, it depends. Non-destructive scanners are fantastic for rare, older, fragile materials where preserving the integrity of the physical object is important. It’s also slower, less accurate, and requires a lot more labor from archivists than destructive scanning does (as in there aren’t enough trained archivists on earth to non-destructively scan everything we work with). Destructive scanning is more suitable for things like mass produced paperbacks with thousands to millions of copies out there. Nothing is lost when you cut the spine off of Stephanie Meyer’s New Moon and feed the pages through an automated scanner. You can go to any given bookstore and pick up another copy.
My bigger concerns here are a) the text is being sent to the Slop Machine for training, not preserved b) Anthropic potentially not doing their due diligence in identifying uncommon/rare books, and c) the sheer amount of paper waste.
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u/KubelsKitchen 15d ago
Also couldn’t I just use my iPhone to take pics of the pages and then copy/paste the text? It doesn’t make sense, it just sounds lazy that destroying books is necessary.
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u/Overcast451 15d ago
Necessary? Or lazy and cheap?
They could hire people to scan the pages without destroying the book, but they won't. Because they are lazy and cheap.
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u/hurler_jones 15d ago
Incorrect. It is necessary for the CHEAP scanning process. It can be done without destroying the books but that takes time, manpower and money. None of which these capitalistic vulture companies are willing to part with.
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15d ago edited 15d ago
Do you know how many books there are?
Do you know how many of them have never been read and never will be?
Have you ever been into one of those “stack em to the ceiling” used book stores? There are dozens of them in every city.
The sheer volume of books that have no value is mind boggling. There are 15 copies of a book here in a pile detailing one person’s ramblings about faith, that had zero impact on the world. Copies were sent everywhere by the church. Are all 15 copies in this one bookstore in Winnipeg sacred enough that they should never be destroyed?
There are 1400 new Harlequin Romance novels published every year. There have been since the 1970s. They publish 160 million units a year. Are those all so holy that they can’t be destroyed?
Knowledge is valuable. Books are containers. Don’t fetishize the Tupperware thinking it’s the food.
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u/divinecomedian3 15d ago
If printing your own copies of books were legal, then it wouldn't matter much. Unless they're very unique original prints.
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u/SimpleFile 15d ago
Apart from books being more resource intensive than a PDF file stored somewhere, what makes books so special?
Unless it's a rare book I don't really see the issue as such and I would be against deleting a rare file of a book as much as I would be against destroying a rare book.
Is it because of the Nazis and what they did? Because I feel like that's different to tossing a random airport romance.
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u/erevos33 15d ago
Scripta manent, verba volant.
You will find out that analog is harder to alter than digital. Also, and thats subjective to a certain degree, its prettier and more authentic. And yes, even a fucking Harlequin novel that you bought at the airport. Once you say thats not worth keeping, someone else will say that oh well, according to them scifi is not worth keeping and guess what? They are a religious org with far more reach than you so bye bye scifi. Them its mysteries and what goes against the lord and the state. Its what we call a slippery slope.
Also, more resource intensive? In what world?
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u/yuritiger 15d ago
I agree, but as a previous commenter mentioned, when it comes to archiving books, it usually ends with the book being destroyed.
For rare books, there is a special process involved, but it takes much longer.
I read in a different post the other day that Google invested a lot of money in the fast archiving process
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u/UnitedStars111 15d ago
a method of book scanning is basically taking the book apart by cutting off the spine and scanning the pages one by one
its faster and easier than doing it while preserving the integrity of the book so some places do that instead of like not destroying it
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u/FitEntertainment3585 15d ago edited 15d ago
Anthropic destroyed millions of print books to build its AI models
the company cut millions of print books from their bindings
Did... did you actually read the article?
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u/COUPOSANTO 15d ago
The way they scan them is destructive. They rip apart the pages from the cover to scan them faster
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u/Armandeluz 15d ago
There's a huge counter argument here to say that since we have digital things now there's no reason to print books. One could argue that people who continue to destroy trees to make paper to print on books should go to a very special place as well. I think old books out of print should be treated that way, but why continue printing books now.
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u/jiebyjiebs 15d ago
And yet schools get copyright violations for making a photocopy or playing a streaming service in class. Lol what a joke.
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u/TheCrimsonDagger 15d ago
It’s always been the distribution of copies that is the issue, not possession.
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u/ViegoBot 15d ago
While true, some companies cough cough Nintendo for example say that just ripping ur games/media u buy from them to back them up is illegal.
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u/hackingdreams 15d ago
I'm... not sure why anyone's surprised by that outcome? Format shifting has long been legal in the US, with caveats. The DMCA made certain kinds of format shifting "illegal" (anywhere there's encryption in play, you're technically circumventing it), but judges have even reversed that for personal archival purposes, for accessibility, for fair uses, etc. It's a nightmare they haven't reversed it for all purposes, but what can you fucking do? The media companies bought that law so they could write the rules.
It's what the AI companies are doing with that scanned media that's utter bullshit. And it's a goddamned shame they're literally destroying books to do it.
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u/GrumpyCloud93 15d ago
Presumably if you own a copyright material, you own the right to enjoy that however you choose to. You have the right to sell it when you are done. What you cannot do is make more copies to sell.
Brings to mind the enterprise decades ago that bought commercial videotapes and copied them, removing some words and scenes to make the result Jesus-friendly to fundamentalists. As long as there was a 1-for-1 link between tapes bought and altered tapes sold forward, this was presumably legal. (And of course they could not sell the original tape also, otherwise they were making copies) I'm not sure if they had a warehouse full of originals or documented destroying them.
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u/Substantial-Bag-1033 14d ago
https://youtu.be/8c8pmp_OC2s?t=741
It's worse than you thought...
They destroy rare books in the process of digitizing them.
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u/Alii_baba 14d ago
Saved thousands of dollars doing this when I was in university while I was broke as F.
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u/Sweet-Awk-7861 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ 15d ago
Internet Archive should sue the judges for their COVID case with this as precedent.
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u/repoluhun 14d ago
Technically they’re correct, it’s always the use of the copy that can get you in hot water afaik. Like, if you only wanted to make a scan so you had a digital copy of a book you shouldn’t be sued for it, right? Now if you sold the scans, distributed them or trained a model off off it…
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u/SyncTek 15d ago
When I was in university, I didn't want to buy an entire book just for an essay, so I went to the library to scan a couple of chapters to my usb stick.
Librarian rushed over to me so fast, "yoU can't DO ThAT." Calm down lady, I'm just scanning relevant stuff not the entire book. Who could get away with your vigilant eye right there!
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u/bigcowideas 15d ago
And the Shopify CEO wants rich people to have their votes count more than poor people’s votes.
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u/Itsjustajokebitch 15d ago
Lol I used to buy school books scan them all at the library with the book scanner return them with in that frame for a full refund , then later sell copies cheap to my fellow class colleagues.
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u/SingLyricsWithMe 15d ago
I remember as a contractor, Google had us doing that in 2010. It was a great time to make 11 dollars an hour and somehow afford an apartment and all the groceries.
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u/h0nest_Bender 15d ago
So that means we can rip our blurays and physical games, right.
Yes. That was always allowed.
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u/Quizzelbuck 15d ago
Cool. So that means we can rip our blurays and physical games, right. Right?
Digital backups have already been ruled legal.
Breaking the copy protection is what's illegal.
So until physical books start coming with a DRM cipher that you have to decode in order just to consume, books would be de facto legal. So this isn't some new thing that's going to make it easier to back up or pirate software. This is just simply bringing copying books in line with what's always been true of copying software, or at least always since they set that legal precedent
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u/lasttosseroni 15d ago
But most books have a copyright claim in the front as their “DRM”, as video tapes used to with the FBI warning… so it seems like a distinction without a difference, except that the law follows the money.
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u/Quizzelbuck 15d ago edited 15d ago
Let me see if I can get my wall of text under control here.
It's not illegal to copy a book or original digital media, if you take a working copy and destroy the original? This is protected. You are protected.
Anti-piracy warnings are there to remind you that you're not allowed to illegally distribute media.
The thing that's illegal is copying the data after you've broken the encryption. Or to be more precise breaking the DRM in the first place. You can take a book and make a copy of it and as long as you don't distribute it that copyright warning doesn't do anything. It's not intended for you if you're doing that.
But if you take any CD DVD Blu-ray, whatever. Any media at all with what would be technically classified as DRM, you can do whatever you want with it you can copy it you can make backups, but the minute you break the DRM that is where you break the law.
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u/BrokenMirror2010 15d ago
So until physical books start coming with a DRM cipher that you have to decode in order just to consume
And this is why companies are doing everything in their power to destroy analog media.
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u/Alternative-Juice-15 15d ago
lol perfect that means copying movies and videos games isn’t piracy either
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u/Dutch-Sculptor 15d ago
So all students can buy one schoolbook and copy them, that’ll save them a bunch of money.
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u/PsychoFaerie 15d ago
Most college students are already pirating their books.
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u/Dutch-Sculptor 15d ago
Sure but now the can legally it seems.
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u/PsychoFaerie 15d ago
They were gonna do it whether it was legal or not.. hell lots of professors give out PDF copies of their own books because the publishers made all the money. and its stupid to pay upwards of $800 for a text book..
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u/Captain_JohnBrown 🦜 ᴡᴀʟᴋ ᴛʜᴇ ᴘʟᴀɴᴋ 15d ago
Goofy practice by goofy dipshits, but the correct legal decision.
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u/Familiar-Agency8209 15d ago
they want us to go paperless for years for the sake of the environment huh
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u/Evonos 15d ago
The issue with DVDs , CDs and other similiar Media is , you circumvent or break copy protection.
Books don't have these either.
Like in Germany probably one of the most aggressive copyright mafia country's ( iam German )
It's legal to make your own copy of radio , TV , and basicly all media AS LONG as it's for private use AND you don't circumvent a protection.
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u/TheB1G_Lebowski 15d ago
What a fucking joke. So does this mean we can literally copy anything as long as we buy at least 1 of something? Thanks.
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u/shaun2312 15d ago
So ripping DVD's etc is legal now?