Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.
To do what?
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AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
21–30 of 961 posts
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#22I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…
this is plainly stupid ... many of these books are likely to have no current publisher nor any way to "reprint" the book. "ai" companies are simply burning our cultural context ...
Wait: the entire premise of copyright is to prevent someone from publishing a book, and a competitor buys a copy, clones it, and sells copies way cheaper because they don't have to pay the author.
Now, in 2026, we're acting like cloning a published book is not technically feasible? That doesn't track. With publishing on-demand, it's easy to imagine a business with digital copies of all these works that they make available for print-on-demand.
The uncomfortable reality is that most of these books are nothing anyone cares about. Even the book sellers in the 404 story call them dead inventory.
Can we get some actual book titles into the discussion so we can focus on facts rather than speculation?
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#23I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…
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Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#24that's ironic, the url annas-archive.gl is blocked by my local DNS category for AI Threat Detection.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#25I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…
> Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest.
What? Even if there are no copyright holders, the AI companies will still do scan'n'destroy because it's just cheap.
Are you expecting the authors/publishers to send digital copies to AI companies directly? Or expecting AI companies to preserve the physical copies indefinitely? Both are not gonna happen, copyrighted or not.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't "force" anything. Trillion dollar AI companies and their owners have as much agency as book publishers.
They are "forced" to do this because that's what they have to do to abide by copyright law. They can't create a digital duplicate without destroying the original.
Since when do AI companies care about copyright law? They're destroying them so their competitors can't use them.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#27I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…
The articles I've read on this are not clear, but I strongly suspect "rare" is not the definition you and I probably use for the level of rarity of books actually being destroyed. These are not going to be the kinds of books "The Ninth Gate" resolved around - truly one of a kind. It's not good they are destroying books, but they are books which do have other copies. Just perhaps not many.
At this scale, there are no guarantees of anything. There very likely will be unique copies in there. If these were expert archivists a lot of damage could be prevented, but given the malice and indifference of AI companies, there very likely will not be an expert archivist involved, and unique copies will be destroyed unceremoniously.
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#28I dislike these AI companies but let's be clear here: the copyright holders are the ones locking these books up. If they don't want to print more copies, then they could release the copyright on them. Instead, they enforce the copyright and force AI companies to shred books they want to ingest. edit: Also, an AI company would only ever care to purchase, scan, destroy a book once. Presumably many books have more than…
It is also the case that the copyright holders are often putting restrictions around use of electronic forms that are driving the desire to use physical copies. I doubt AI companies would use a single physical book if they could avoid it - absent the legal cloud over electronic rights. I have no evidence but I can't help suspecting in part the publicity around this is driven in part by rights holders that want to for…
There is a whole legal saga here that is often misunderstood. Googling "Project Panama" should give more information.
The legal ruling from Judge William Alsup declared that if AI companies purchased the books legally and then copied them to their servers, it was fair use as a "transformative" operation, but the originals had to be destroyed in that case, because then there was only one copy still in existence (the one on Anthropic's servers):
From https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/05/anthro...
> Under US copyright law, the “fair use” doctrine allows you to make “transformative” use of copyrighted works without the owner’s permission. Anthropic took printed books and scanned them, “transforming” or remediating them into a new, electronic format. They then disposed of the original printed copy: the “destructive” part of destructive scanning. Along the way, Anthropic’s vendors had already sliced the spines and edges of the books, to scan them more easily before destroying them. “One replaced the other,” as Judge William Alsup wrote, noting: “There is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company.”
Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#29Re: AI companies destroy physical books – let's scan rare books before it's too late
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ai companies don't use ebooks, because they are more expensive than second hand books
They absolutely do. Meta torrented 81 terabytes of ebooks. They just have no incentive to pay when the law looks the other way.
I meant paid ebooks. That's probably what the commenter refers to, because that's what publishers want. Obviously ai companies don't want to pay so they try to use pirated ebooks