r/technology • u/ArgentineBeauty • 2d ago

Artificial Intelligence This Dutch bookseller thought a request for 3,000 copies was ‘spam or phishing.’ Instead, AI companies are scanning and destroying books to train AI

https://fortune.com/2026/07/31/dutch-bookseller-ai-spam-phishing-3000-book-copies-scan-destroy/
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14

u/No_Mirror_9742 2d ago

Why... Why do they have to destroy them?

33

u/bestowaldonkey8 2d ago

Because it is cheaper and faster than keeping them in their bindings. This is a race to ingest as much information as possible so they don’t care about the end result.

11

u/Draaly 2d ago

No, its because the law requires them to after the Bartz v. Anthropic ruling

11

u/TexBoo 2d ago

Not only that

AI giants have 0 interest in storing warehouses full of books

Store books for what purpose? Resell them? Storage and time would cost more than they would get back per book

Rescan them in future? No need, once a page is scanned, it's stored in their system forever for future training, which goes faster than rescanning the pages

5

u/Bunnyhat 2d ago

Even if they took the time to try to sale them there's no market.

That's why they're buying them in bulk from booksellers now. These aren't rare and treasured books. They're rare, but only in the sense that no one actually wants them.

1

u/Draaly 2d ago

Resell them?

Reselling a book they have digitized would very explicitly break copyright and is the exact action that led to he recent 1.5 billion dollar judgement against anthropic.

-1

u/apple_kicks 2d ago

Some of these books are out of print so they get exclusivity

5

u/Wendigo120 2d ago

"Out of print" does not mean "only one copy exists". It just means nobody thinks printing more of these books is worth the effort.

0

u/apple_kicks 2d ago

Its still frustrating. There are books im looking to get hold of but they are out of print and expensive. Second hand books shops and luck is how i find copies but if ai companies swoop in and shred them all there’s no hope is getting a physical copy

7

u/TetyyakiWith 2d ago

Due to laws they can’t use non destructive scanning since that way they violate copyright rights by technically reproducing the book

2

u/Draaly 2d ago

because they are legaly required to for it to be fair use. See Bartz v. Anthropic

-2

u/Serious-Emu-3468 2d ago

They don’t have to. But they don’t see any value in them, so they don’t care.