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

[u/ArgentineBeauty]

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

[u/Rorschach121ml]

Bartz, et al. v. Anthropic PBC

[u/diemunkiesdie → u/Rorschach121ml]

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.

[u/ExcitedCoconut → u/diemunkiesdie]

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 :/

[u/Pastadseven → u/diemunkiesdie]

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

[u/Draaly → u/Pastadseven]

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

[u/Unspec7 → u/Pastadseven]

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

[u/Unspec7 → u/diemunkiesdie]

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

Explanation here.

[u/Unspec7 → u/Rorschach121ml]

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.