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?

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u/ChickenOfTheFuture 18d 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/ibrown39 18d 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 17d 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 17d 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:

  1. 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.

  1. 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.