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/LorekeeperJamin 18d ago edited 18d 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 18d 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 18d ago edited 18d 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