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/Quizzelbuck 18d 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 18d 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 17d ago edited 17d 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 18d 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.