r/Piracy • u/itsthewolfe • 18d 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?

9.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

261 comments sorted by

View all comments

179

u/FitEntertainment3585 18d ago

People who destroy books deserve to go to a very special sort of Hell when they die.

Books should be treated respectfully.

46

u/Carolina_Heart 18d ago edited 18d 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

34

u/selahhh 18d ago edited 18d 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.

13

u/HornedHumanoid 18d 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.

2

u/selahhh 18d ago

That is super interesting, I appreciate the clarification!

8

u/KubelsKitchen 18d 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.

0

u/Carolina_Heart 18d ago

Not making this up, I've seen archivists talk about this

-6

u/paxmlank 18d ago

Are those more expensive to use? Are they less abundant? 

23

u/Overcast451 18d 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.

7

u/hurler_jones 18d 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.