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The destruction of the books is mentioned many times, and the overall analysis says this: > The copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digi

The destruction of the books is mentioned many times, and the overall analysis says this: > The copies used to convert purchased print library copies into digital library copies were justified, too, though for a different fair use. The first factor strongly favors this result, and the third favors it, too. The fourth is neutral. Only the second slightly disfavors it. On balance, as the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement not redistributed, this was a fair use. I do not think the ruling would have gone this way if the books were not destroyed, as many would assert that Anthropic would retain them to sell later, otherwise. The fact that destruction is mentioned so pervasively in the decision suggests it is an important fact to consider. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.434709/gov.uscourts.cand.434709.231.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.43...

kmeisthax 2mo ago
I read that as "here's a list of reasons why Anthropic isn't usurping the market for copies of these books" and not "destroying a book makes scanning it legal". Non-destructive book scanning wasn't going to come up in this case because it's a hypothetical[0]. Courts don't deal in hypotheticals, so they didn't rule on nondestructive scanning. Normally, that would mean that the question is still open; Alsup or any other judge would be free to draw the line later. But there is also other Ninth Circuit precedent that explicitly legalizes nondestructive format shifting. If I rip a CD to play it on my phone, I'm not obliged to destroy the CD, but I can't sell the CD until and unless I delete the MP3s. I don't see why books would be different. EDIT: Also, forgot to mention that Google Books was built with non-destructively scanned books and that was ruled legal too, albeit in the Second Circuit instead of the Ninth. [0] To be clear, it's a hypothetical because it would be prohibitively expensive at the rate of which AI companies want to ingest pre-AI tokens.

kmeisthax 2mo ago

I read that as "here's a list of reasons why Anthropic isn't usurping the market for copies of these books" and not "destroying a book makes scanning it legal". Non-destructive book scanning wasn't going to come up in this case because it's a hypothetical[0]. Courts don't deal in hypotheticals, so they didn't rule on nondestructive scanning. Normally, that would mean that the question is still open; Alsup or any other judge would be free to draw the line later. But there is also other Ninth Circuit precedent that explicitly legalizes nondestructive format shifting. If I rip a CD to play it on my phone, I'm not obliged to destroy the CD, but I can't sell the CD until and unless I delete the MP3s. I don't see why books would be different. EDIT: Also, forgot to mention that Google Books was built with non-destructively scanned books and that was ruled legal too, albeit in the Second Circuit instead of the Ninth. [0] To be clear, it's a hypothetical because it would be prohibitively expensive at the rate of which AI companies want to ingest pre-AI tokens.