Posted on 07/30/2026 7:16:31 AM PDT by Red Badger
The ruling does change the fundamental nature of what the books were intended for: they were intended to be read by human beings, not used as training for machines to replace human thought and ingenuity.
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AI companies are buying old books, scanning them, then destroying them. Anthropic has been buying the books to feed the machine with human knowledge and ideas written down before the AI era, so only books with publication dates before 2022 will do. Once they have the books, they rip off the spines, feed them through a scanner, and then on into the gaping maw of the AI LLMs that consume everything, including, eventually, themselves.
The revelations came out in a lawsuit brought by authors who said the destruction violated the Copyright Act. Federal judge for the Northern District of California William Alsup ruled that the bulk buy, scanning, and destruction is fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act. As far back as 2024, Anthropic, which has come under fire by the Trump administration over national security concerns, said "We don’t want it to be known that we are working on this." It's not a good look to be destroying books.
The suit reads that authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson were a few of the authors whose books were bought by Anthropic. For use in Claude, Anthropic "assembled these copies into a central library of its own, copied further various sets and subsets of those library copies to include in various 'data mixes,' and used these mixes to train various LLMs. Anthropic kept the library copies in place as a permanent, general-purpose resource even after deciding it would not use certain copies to train LLMs or would never use them again to do so." The authors had not agreed to this and these copies of their books were taken permanently out of circulation, never to be read by human eyes again.
Anthropic is one of these companies that has been buying physical books in bulk to rip apart, scan, then destroy, in service to its AI model Claude. Any books will do, even if that book is the very last copy of that book in the world. Legally, this is allowed under the first-sale doctrine, which permits a book-buyer to do whatever they want with that book object, without a need for the copyright owner's permission. It's an object, like a pair of shoes or a blender.
The ruling reads: "every purchased print copy was copied in order to save storage space and to enable searchability as a digital copy. The print original was destroyed. One replaced the other. And, there is no evidence that the new, digital copy was shown, shared, or sold outside the company."
In the suit, a judge found that because Anthropic was using the books in a way that fundamentally transformed them into something else, in this case turning them from books into raw data that will have no reference to their original self, and that this constituted fair use. Previous to the bulk buying of books, Anthropic pirated books or bought pirated books. They looked to former head of Google Books' scan project Tom Turvey to come in and get more data to feed the LLM. That data was not just information but also style and tone, proprietary authorial elements.
There's lots of companies that are willing to do the selling. ISBNdb claims to have the "world's largest book database," and says "the world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf." They also promise not to reveal who is doing the bulk buying, knowing that no AI company wants to be the subject of a headline about how they're destroying millions of books at a go.
ISBNdb says that AI training on AI material results in data degradation. "Not all data degradation is intentional," says ISBNdb. "When AI systems train on text that was itself AI-generated, a documented phenomenon called model collapse occurs: subtle linguistic nuances vanish, systematic errors compound, and outputs converge on repetitive patterns. Each generation trained on synthetic data is slightly worse than the last. Print books from the pre-LLM era are structurally guaranteed to be free of this contamination. That alone is a significant advantage."
404 Media spoke to a bookseller who said that bulk orders from his store have resulted in the destruction of out-of-print books for which there are only single copies remaining. "I personally have mixed feelings about all of this," said the bookseller. "It benefits me financially as well as by clearing out old inventory that is otherwise unlikely to sell. I’ve been well-suited for these sales with inventory from overseas and foreign language books. On the other hand, I don’t like the end-use, and I don’t like that uncommon books are being pulped."
The ruling reads: "This order grants summary judgment for Anthropic that the training use was a fair use. And, it grants that the print-to-digital format change was a fair use for a different reason. But it denies summary judgment for Anthropic that the pirated library copies must be treated as training copies." The ruling does change the fundamental nature, however, of what the books were intended for: they were intended to be read by human beings, not used as training for machines to replace human thought and ingenuity.
As it stands, Anthropic and other AI companies that are developing and furthering their large language models for use both as information and writing tools are permitted to take books out of circulation, feed them to the LLM, and destroy them, without concern for copyright law or, as it turns out, the preservation of the scope and breadth of human history, knowledge, experience, and creativity.
After Ollies or Goodwill they go to the paper recycler that has too much scrap paper already, so then they go to the landfill..............
Regarding the fear some have of AI, I'm a software engineer, a "programmer" if you will. While I have made good use of AI in work/job efforts, I don't think it will displace me soon. I run the hardware/software boundary, designing uP based circuits and writing the software for functional devices. Until AI can build prototypes, touch the correct spot with an oscilloscope probe, and reiterate the process I'm OK. I'll be dead long before AI enters my domain.
Some people imagine themselves to be software engineers when they are actually "coders". This is the bunch that authors web pages and twiddles with databases. They need to be worried because nothing they do requires "hands on" other than typing and point-N-click.
China buys our waste paper in container ship loads.
OK! I contacted Royal Signets and popped the question. They thought it was an outstanding idea; but, wouldn't guarantee a camera could pick up the code from the face of a ring. They are perfectly willing to make one for $250. Their site allows any picture to be uploaded for a custom design.
You are clearly missing the point. Let me slow down and not assume anything.
AI is replacing people’s jobs. That’s a fact. White collar jobs are the most impacted for now until they get robots to catch up in technology then manual labor can be replaced by a robot.
So people are afraid and hate AI because of this. Artists hate it because now I don’t need to hire one to make a basic book cover (for example), music can now be done by people who don’t know how to play but do know what sounds good, programmers aren’t needed either, books can be written without the author, news reports can be done without the entourage of writers, etc...
People hate this, so they are looking at every and anything to shun AI. If they have to make an issue out of destroying books to make AI look bad they will. If they have to cry about electricity prices going up because AI requires a lot of it and gov’t isn’t allowing new electric plants to be built making the cost of electricity to go higher...they will blame AI (not the gov’t blocking expanding our energy grid). Whatever they can grasp on to make AI look bad they will.
So in this article people are crying with faux outrage about books being destroyed. Even though they live on digitally forever.
The next question would be: Where do you get a QR Code that would be UNIQUE TO YOU???????...............
I was never responding to that fear, and don't plan to address it in this thread. I was responding only to the angst over destruction of the books.
Go to Free QR Code and type in "Red Badger". Your phone will read it correctly.
That would make an AWESOME CHRISTMAS OR BIRTHDAY GIFT!................
Post 106 does a nice job of dissecting the actual issue.
Do Students Still Need to Learn Calculus?
https://www.educationnext.org/do-students-still-need-to-learn-calculus/
Bring back my 8 tracks!
I haven’t bought a physical book in years. I went to the library out by my mom’s place. They built a massive new building and there are about 1/4 the books they had in the old small building. The non fiction side had hardly anything. Books are going away. And the ones that last. Well. The imported illiterate muslim turds will burn what’s left.
I have a Kindle. Books are now downloadable.
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You dont actually get it do you? The problem is the OLD editions being destroyed thus cutting off access to them in the future. Said books can then be digitally altered and the bastardized false version will become generally accepted.
Much the way the web and wikis now say all kinds of minorities “invented “ this or that when the original historical data is flat out not the case.
This is the total rewriting of history being prepared, complete cultural genocide.
LMAO. Too funny. As if you ever cared about old books. Show me one post where you supported keeping old books.
And no you can’t digitally alter a book if it’s digitally signed. Well you could but it would be evident that it’s tampered with. Plus you can download the book yourself and keep your own copy before anyone changed it. You know people used to change books all the time when they manually transcribed them...there were more errors and changes that way than digitally altering a book to bastardize it.
You’re just afraid of AI.
Not necessarily. Remember copyright lasts a really long time in America.
They absolutely can do that. It’s unethical, and the fact that they’re doing it just to feed their copyright violation monster is downright evil. But they can do it.
I’ve collected old and rare books since I was a child. That’s beside the point.
My personal tastes aren’t at issue - the history and culture of the West are. Yes errors were always an issue, we arent talking errors. We are talking about wholesale deliberate wiping out truth and replacing them with DEI and PC fraud.
Of course I’m afraid of AI BEING ABUSED to control the populace’s thinking and ability to argue for and enjoy and experience their history, culture and rights. So is every intelligent critical thinker with an ounce of decency.
Oh and AI is largely hype - few benefits and huge downsides. But that isn’t the discussion here.
You realize once they are digitized you can download them all in “pristine” fashion and share them with others to show any changes that were made.
Clearly you’re just afraid of AI because you don’t understand it and you don’t like change. Your argument that a book is being destroyed because they will change it later is ridiculous.
Even if that book existed and was never destroyed...it’s not like people are going to line up to compare the digital version to the hardback.
But what is more likely is people will collect the digital copies and have the originally scanned book.
You’d be wrong. They got sued over that and had to pay for the works they did that with.
But you can look up how long a copyright lasts here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_duration_by_country
And you think magically stopped just because they caught? They’re just tweaking the output to make it harder to prove.
In order to be in public domain in the US it basically have to have been published before 1931. After that you’re basically looking at life of the creator 70 years, or 95 years. With a lot of legal fun deciding which path the thing is on. Plenty of rare books in that window.
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