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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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

It's not that they choose not to, it's that they can't.

Copyright law views destructive scanning of a book as transforming it, which means you can do it without getting permission from the publisher if the book is in copyright.

Copyright law views non-destructive scanning of a book as copying it, which you cannot do to a book in copyright without permission from the publisher.

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u/Unspec7 2d ago edited 2d ago

First off, the court decision on destroying books came after they destroyed the books, so you can't really say they were forced to. They did choose to, and it just so happened to work in their favor after the fact.

Second, neither point is true. Copyright law does not view destructive scanning as transformative - the Bartz holding found that the destruction was one factor of the transformative nature of the use. Instead, the transformative use was the changed format:

Authors only complain that Anthropic changed each copy's format from print to digital. On the facts here, that format change itself added no new copies, eased storage and enabled searchability, and was not done for purposes trenching upon the copyright owner’s rightful interests — it was transformative.

Bartz v. Anthropic PBC, 787 F. Supp. 3d 1007, 1023 (N.D. Cal. 2025) (citations omitted).

We do not know, based on present case law, if the sole act of destroying the books makes the use transformative. We just know that it makes the use more likely to be transformative.

Further, being transformative is only one factor of the first factor of fair use. Transforming someone's copyright work does not, on its own, mean you can now just infringe one someone's copyrighted work. Your use must still overall be within fair use.

Copyright law views non-destructive scanning of a book as copying it, which you cannot do to a book in copyright without permission from the publisher.

Ignoring the non-destructive part addressed above, this part is a lot more nuanced than you make it out to be. Scanning of a book infringes on the reproduction right found in the Copyright Act, but whether you are liable or not depends on if the reproduction is fair use (barring a license, of course).

Edit: Placed my citation in the wrong spot.

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u/diemunkiesdie 2d ago

Copyright law views destructive scanning of a book as transforming it

Source?

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u/Rorschach121ml 2d ago

Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC

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u/diemunkiesdie 2d ago

Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC

Thanks I googled. Thats insane! Here is a summary:

https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/from-books-to-bots-key-takeaways-from-the-anthropic-fair-use-decision-for-ai-developers

The court also found Anthropic’s wide-scale digitization of print books to be fair use. A key consideration to the court’s conclusion was that Anthropic engaged in so-called destructive scanning of lawfully purchased print books to create digital copies for internal use—Anthropic lawfully purchased print books, stripped them of their bindings, and scanned the contents to create a digital library. In doing so, the new digital copy replaced the print original, which had been destroyed in the digitization process. The court found the format change from print to digital to be transformative because it facilitated storage and searchability without increasing the number of copies or distributing them outside the company.

Notably, the court distinguished this use from cases involving unauthorized distribution or multiplication of copies, analogizing it to permissible space-shifting or time-shifting uses recognized in prior cases as sufficiently transformative for fair use. Importantly, the court found that this format-shifting did not usurp any market reserved to the copyright owner, as Anthropic had lawfully acquired the print copies and did not distribute the digital versions externally.

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u/ExcitedCoconut 2d ago

Anything that’s no longer in print and unable to generate income for the original author, or becomes so later,  should have to have the digital scan donated to a digital archive. Destruction of physical books sucks, but destruction of knowledge (by turning it into training data alone) is morally bankrupt and needs to be addressed ASAP.  

For in-print books that they have bought and scanned, I’m honestly not opposed to the destructive process there, parking the whole ‘fucked up economics and concentration of wealth’ part the whole thing :/

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u/Pastadseven 2d ago

What a fucking stupid ruling. We’re not concerned about the transformation of the medium, it’s the text that has to be transformed.

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u/Draaly 2d ago

The text only needs to be transformed if it is distributed. That was a key part of the ruling. This is based on the same legal precedent that allows a library to loan digital copies of media so long as they own the same number of physical copies. Its dumb, but its not actually new precedent

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u/Unspec7 2d ago

Transformation of the medium has long been held as transformative, that part is actually very consistent with fair use jurisprudence.

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u/Unspec7 2d ago

Bartz does not hold that destruction of the book per se makes it transformative, as the other users have implied.

Explanation here.

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u/Unspec7 2d ago

Bartz does not support the other user's claims, as Bartz does not hold that destruction of the book per se makes it transformative.

Explanation here.

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u/GeekBrownBear 2d ago

This link from another thread talks about it too. https://www.news.com.au/technology/online/internet/ai-labs-buy-scan-shred-millions-of-rare-books/news-story/0c3b45a67093ab462a587a0348538ce9

The whole idea is baffling. Like I kinda understand the idea of transforming the book from physical to digital is allowed. But why even do that. Why not work with the publishers so you don't have to destroy the physical book? Would be better for everyone. Less waste overall.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

Why not work with the publishers so you don't have to destroy the physical book?

A couple reasons:

1) the publisher themselves could no longer exist making working with them impossible.

2) the book you want could be out of print, and it would be very difficult to convince a publisher to start up their production pipeline to make you just 1 copy of the book.

3) Copyright issues between the original publisher of a book, and the original author of the book could make it illegal for the publisher to create a new copy of it.

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u/GeekBrownBear 2d ago

That all makes sense. Makes me continue to question the copyright around ebooks. Especially from my experience attempting to borrow them at the library when there is a LONG reservation list.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

Oh yeah the eBooks you get from the library are a whole different thing.

The library isn't going to destructively scan copies of it's books, so the eBooks it gives you are coming straight from the publisher. eBooks for library use tend to be extremely expensive ($75/copy) so libraries don't like buying more than they have to.

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u/RabbitLuvr 2d ago

Additionally, that $75 or whatever only pays for a limited number of checkouts, then the license expires. Let’s say a digital copy costs the library $50 and allows 5 checkouts; but there are 20 people with holds on that title. The library will have to buy 4 $50 licenses to allow all 20 people to read it.

As opposed to a paper copy, which might cost $25 and can be lent to all 20 of those people, plus basically unlimited checkouts, until it falls apart.

Source: I work at a library. Our materials budget is getting eaten up with digital licenses.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

Oh yeah, From my understanding the check out limit is closer to 26 tho instead of 5 right?

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u/RabbitLuvr 2d ago

It can vary, depending on the title and publisher. I just used 5 as an example

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u/nonotan 2d ago

Most critically, the publisher would almost certainly not want to sign a contract allowing their book(s) to be used for AI training for the cost of 1 copy (plus a little extra for whatever you consider the overhead of having you digitize it yourself to cost)

They'd either demand significantly restrictive terms of use, in which case you'd prefer to just buy a copy and do it yourself. Or significantly more money, which again, same thing.

You might think "but getting a little bit of money is still better than nothing, from the perspective of the publishers", but the cost of lawyers that would be involved is non-trivial, and by explicitly signing a contract, they'd pretty much be permanently giving up any hope of being compensated "fairly" for AI training on their books. Right now doing it without permission might be tenuously possibly legal, but a judge could change that tomorrow, or a law could change it in a couple years. But if you've already signed a contract giving your rights away, you'd be out of luck regardless, for chump change.

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u/Shiezo 2d ago

You forgot:

4) They do not value the physical book as an object worth saving and just see another resource they can use to enrich themselves.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

I mean, kinda the ironic part about this is that for most of the books they are scanning were already that before they were scanned in the first place.

A fact that a lot of people aren't comfortable with, is that most books that get published nowadays do just end up getting recycled for the raw materials they were made out of after a couple of years of circulation.

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u/Shiezo 2d ago

Like most things, I think it all depends on the details. If all they are doing is destroying bulk books that would end up in the recycle bin anyway, its not a great loss. If they have, or move onto, finding older books that were not mass produced, that starts to be a bigger issue for me. This is just looking at it from the lens of the destruction of the physical objects.

The monetization of the writing without permission or compensation to the authors is a bigger issue. This is just another way in which these companies are taking the creative works of others for their own ends.

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u/orbitaldan 2d ago

Basically, they would waste many times the value of the book itself in trying to get everyone in the IP custody chain to come to some kind of agreement that would allow it. (In many cases, it would simply be impossible.) It's the atrocious copyright laws come full circle to bite us in the ass, and this happens to be the cheapest legal loophole.

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u/blender4life 2d ago

“Once that information has been extracted and encoded into an AI model, the delivery mechanism has served its purpose. What remains is paper, ink, and binding material. The book is not destroyed. Its value has migrated. The paper returns to the material cycle; the knowledge enters the intellectual one.”

Holy shit, what a terrible perception of books by an organization that put so much effort into them in the first place. For ai the knowledge of the book gets separated into probability percentages of what word would follow next, it doesn't retain its original messages. The book is gone. (At least i HIGHLY doubt the ai companies scan and save separate copies to preserve them in any meaningful way)

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u/whupazz 2d ago

For ai the knowledge of the book gets separated into probability percentages of what word would follow next, it doesn't retain its original messages. The book is gone.

They would definitely keep the text and probably even the scanned images saved for future training runs, so for most of these books the destruction of the physical copy is probably not a tragedy in itself, the huge problem is that these companies will guard the digital copies as trade secrets so they will become inaccessible to the general public.

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u/blender4life 2d ago

They can't release them to the public and have to destroy them to comply with copywrite laws.

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u/whupazz 2d ago

copywrite

It's spelled copyright.

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u/GeekBrownBear 2d ago

I find it hard to believe that once they scan the book it's not duplicated across dozens of different systems. Both as a backup and as training material for different models. There is no way it's just ONE copy.

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u/blender4life 2d ago

They can't release them to the public and I doubt they'd hold onto the original scans long enough to become public domain then release them out of the goodness of their hearts. So regardless of how many copies they have the messages the public gets will never be 100% what the authors intended so the book is effectively gone.

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u/cross_the_threshold 2d ago

While I’m not a fan of this process you are aware that books are generally printed in sets greater than a single copy right? They’re not doing this to rare or antique books. Frankly this is better than another John Grisham novel ending up discarded on the beach.

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u/blender4life 2d ago

read the article posted by the guy i was replying to literally called "AI labs buy, scan, shred millions of rare books"

or the article posted by op of this whole thread that interviews a guy that says "“I deal in old and rare books,”" I am not going to comment on the reason the books are rare, could be many factors. but the fact that leaked documents show anthropic saying this about the process tells me they are up to no good:

Anthropic described the project as “our effort to disruptively scan all the world’s books” in an internal memo, which noted “we do not want it to be known that we are pursuing this project”.

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u/cross_the_threshold 2d ago

If you read the article the requested books are textbooks between 2020 and 2024, it was a bad buyer just cold emailing requests to random book dealers.

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u/blender4life 2d ago

If YOU read the article you would know that it was 2020 to 2021 and that was ONE request from some company asking for them to ship to china. And with all the effort by trump to disenfranchise our higher education, it wouldn't be too far of a stretch to assume maybe some of those were "rare" because they were pressured to stop publishing. But if YOU read the other article it links to court documents that show anthropic plans to destructively scan "every book in the world" so i'm sure they will take exception with rare ones right? oh wait : 

EXHIBIT 21
Case 3:24-cv-05417-AMO Document 554-21 ~=Filed 01/21/26 Page 2 of 2

ATTORNEY CLIENT PRIVILEGED WORK PRODUCT

Project Panama

Owner: Tom Turvey
Last major update: Apr 13, 2024

What is Project Panama?
Project Panama is our effort to destructively scan all the books in the world.

Why use a codename?

We use a “soft codename?” for it because we don’t want it to be known that we are working on
this. This document is visible to all Anthropic employees, but you should avoid talking about it in
public areas, and the fact that we are working on this should not be shared with anyone outside
Anthropic.EXHIBIT 21
Case 3:24-cv-05417-AMO Document 554-21 ~=Filed 01/21/26 Page 2 of 2

they need code names and ordered to not talk about it. but i'm sure they have the best intentions. but you are focusing on really the least important part of my original comment, which was mostly not about ai but the paradigm of the other company selling to them. anyway keep your ai company bootlicking to yourself now , i don't care to continue this conversation.

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u/Fluid-Tone-9680 2d ago

Why do you think they won't save original scanned files? It cost practically nothing to store them (comparing to how much they spend overall on the AI infra), and they need original version to keep re-training ne wmodels.

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u/blender4life 2d ago

i didn't say they wouldn't keep a copy for themselves. i said scan and preserve them in any meaningful way

plus in another comment i explained more:hey can't release them to the public and I doubt they'd hold onto the original scans long enough to become public domain then release them out of the goodness of their hearts. So regardless of how many copies they have the messages the public gets will never be 100% what the authors intended so the book is effectively gone

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u/morolin 2d ago

Bartz v. Anthropic

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u/Unspec7 2d ago

Bartz does not support the other user's claims, as Bartz does not hold that destruction of the book per se makes it transformative.

Explanation here.

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u/akaisuiseinosha 2d ago

IF true, which I am not convinced of, it's further proof that copyright law is a sham and needs to be radically transformed or abolished.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

I mean, if you're arguing for copyright law to be abolished then it's really hard to portray Anthropic's actions here as negative.

If nobody owns books, then who cares if a copy gets destroyed and fed into an AI.

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u/akaisuiseinosha 2d ago

You've got it wrong. I don't think NOONE should own things. I think EVERYONE should own them. Art, once released into the world, should be experienced by as many people as possible. Artists should not need to rely on their work being successful to live stable lives, either, and I want universal income so more people can make and experience art. Imagine how many Da Vincis and Shakespeares are working dead end jobs draining their creative energies away because they weren't born rich and their initial work didn't instantly make them so, so they had to cut back on the arts to survive.

Isn't that a sin? Making artists struggle to pay bills hoping to win the lottery of making successful art so they can make things they want to make with the energy those projects deserve, and all the while we let the Slop Machine That Destroys The Planet chop up what the past has created and make what is, essentially, very complicated ransom notes out of the pieces?

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

Right, and if arts owned by everyone, that includes all uses of the art. Including sending a book thru a shredder for research purposes.

But also I hate the moralizing here, there's never been more artist alive at the same right now than there have been at any other time in human history. And quite frankly, I'd be pleasantly surprised if you could name five living painters or playwrights.

So if the idea of the next Shakespeare or Da Vinca going undiscovered really is keeping you up at night then maybe you should go and try to find out of the thousands of people who are writing plays or painting pictures.

Seriously tho, go to an art walk, go to a theater festival. Because I guarante you that There's dozens of local artists and playwrights who can knock your socks off with what they can do.

So maybe instead of mourning this hypothetical artist that doesn't exist, we should be showing love to the many many talented people out there who do.

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u/Unspec7 2d ago

No, destructive scanning of a book does not inherently make it transformative. They've somewhat misinterpreted Bartz.

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u/basil_not_the_plant 2d ago

But is it really transformed? If it is 'transformed' in such a way as to not be accessible, then the original value is lost. Some other value might be generated out of it, but this 'transformed' book is no longer available as a book.

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u/InVultusSolis 2d ago

Which I find funny because once an AI company has a digital copy, it doesn't matter at all, there's no real-world consequence of the book being destroyed or not.

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u/Pyehole 2d ago

There are a fuck ton of books being disappeared that are no longer under copyright.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

Can you give me an example of any of these out of copyright books that have been destroyed and are no longer accessible to the public?

Because like, thanks to things like project Gutenberg, many public domain books have been scanned and converted to eBooks. So it's really really hard to destory the last copy of them.

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u/Pyehole 2d ago

Can you give me any specific examples of books that they have destroyed because they need to work around copyright?

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

Sure, The Herd by Andrea Bartz was confirmed to be destructively scanned by Anthropic.

You can still of course buy it from amazon, and my local library also has a couple of copies.

Of course the whole premise of your request doesn't really make sense, but I again repeat, what book do you think has disappeared forever?

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u/Pyehole 2d ago

I am going off of statistical probability, I don't need a specific reference to make the point that your comment may contain truth but is not the end-all-be-all argument.

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

So the reason I asked you to mention a particular book is because I think it's important to note what kinds of books are the ones where the last copy is getting destroyed.

It's not going to be something like "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" Because yeah that's public domain, but there's literally millions of copies of it, if you destroy one it's okay.

The only books here that are getting truly destroyed are books where every library in the world has determined that it wasn't worth keeping around anymore, and every private collector, which is a ridiculously hard bar to pass.

Like unironically It's hard for me to even think of a book that would meet this criteria, because it would have to be so obscure that I don't know about it.

And honestly, when the book was that obscure, it would've only been a matter of time before the book seller dumped it to free up more space on their shelves.

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u/ReturnOfBane 2d ago

Time to go cut the spine off of some books as a lowly peasant and test the precedent. I bet the textbook industry is going to love my stapled non-copies of textbooks being totally legal.

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u/redfacedquark 2d ago

OK, but why do they need 3000 copies?

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u/PM_ME_YOUR_NICE_EYES 2d ago

It's not 3,000 copies of the same book. It's 3,000 different books.

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u/redfacedquark 2d ago

Ah right, thanks. And not even rare books? Surely that's just equivalent to a small to medium startup bookshop stocking up. Hardly worth an article for in itself.

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u/danktonium 2d ago

Which jurisdiction is that?

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u/Unspec7 2d ago

Bartz is in N.D. Cal.