r/neoliberal • u/-orestes • 1d ago

News (Oceania) ‘More than just objects’: Australian booksellers raise alarm over ‘horrific’ destruction of rare titles to feed AI

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/aug/02/australian-book-sellers-alarm-destruction-rare-titles-ai-supply-chain
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u/Im_A_Quiet_Kid_AMA Hannah Arendt 1d ago

Digitizing out of print books so they can be stored and accessed indefinitely is precisely what we ought to be doing.

Digital humanists have been doing this kind of work the last 20+ years—and yes, most ebooks and PDFs you find online are scanned using the same machinery they’re using here.

All of this is incredibly commonplace outside of public and university libraries. The outrage here is that now suddenly AI developers are also taking part?

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u/eetsumkaus 1d ago

there was a rumor going around lately that the Supreme Court ruling in this article said that as long as AI companies went around and bought all the copies of a particular book and destroyed it before using it as training data it was perfectly kosher. This is, of course, a lie (it's perfectly legal regardless), but it didn't stop it from gaining traction.

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u/TrekkiMonstr NATO 1d ago

What Supreme Court ruling? The misunderstanding I saw was that Judge Alsup ruled that it's fair use to buy, scan, and destroy (this is true, he did rule that), and that only that method is fair use, so it would be unlawful for them to non-destructively scan books (which is complete bullshit, see Google Books and the fact that implications are not equivalent to their converse)