I had always heard that Google did the 'books' project such that they were waiting for the suit because they legitimately didn't know _who_ to pay in order to a

I had always heard that Google did the 'books' project such that they were waiting for the suit because they legitimately didn't know _who_ to pay in order to achieve their objective in adding more dimensions to their search empire. The copyright law is rooted in the ability to have someone else profit off of reproducing your content. In the Anthropic lawsuit "the plaintiffs did not allege, nor did the record show, that Anthropic’s Claude LLM outputted infringing copies or substantial reproductions of the plaintiffs’ works" (https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/from-books-to-bots-key-takeaways-from-the-anthropic-fair-use-decision-for-ai-developers https://www.ropesgray.com/en/insights/alerts/2025/06/from-bo...). Destroying your own property is legally allowed. Doing it at scale sucks, but is still allowed. As long as Anthropic et al don't distribute their digital copies then there's nothing legally wrong about what they're doing.