Copyright law prefers the destructive method. It's not that they're skirting the law but that the law is set up very badly in the first place.

Issue really is first sale doctrine. Meaning that after first sale there is very much leeway for the product owner. Even to scan and destroy it.

Copyright ways. Form change probably should be compensated. Even if it means that you wouldn't be able to format change your own media. Or that such activities wouldn't be allowed without compensation over certain threshold.

Wasn't copyright law supposed to support creation and propagation of works of art ? Instead, apparently it is A-OK or even encouraged by the same law to destroy books.

That does not make any sense! Really might be high time to scrap it all.

No, it doesn't. Copyright doesn't care about copies, it cares about copying. If it did care about copies - i.e. the total number of copies in circulation - then ReDigi and the Internet Archive's Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) program would have both been legal. Destroying a copy does not give you permission to create a replacement copy.

The only relevant case law for AI training in the US is the rulings in the Anthropic lawsuit presided over by Judge Alsup. That lawsuit ruled that it's infringement to build a shadow library from pirated books; but NOT to train AI on those pirated books. The only point where destructive book scanning even comes into play is that Anthropic also had a book scanning program alongside their piracy, Judge Alsup said that program was not infringing, and Anthropic happened to be destroying books. At no point did Alsup say that leaving the books whole would have infringed copyright - it was never even considered as it was outside the scope of the lawsuit.

Now, if Anthropic were to non-destructively scan books, store them in a library, and sell the books on, that could be infringing. All the case law about format shifting presumes the owner retains the original. So Anthropic would likely have to hold onto books, at least the ones they wanted to train on, until they were done training on that book[0]. But they do not have to destroy them permanently. They are destroying these books specifically because it is cheaper to do so than to use, say, the Internet Archive's own custom-built nondestructive scanners.

[0] I am absolutely furious about how much this sounds like "fair use is just an extra license you get when you buy a book", and I would much rather have had Judge Alsup just say AI training is not fair use instead.

Courts found that having a central library of 7 million pirated books is against the law, and assessed a large penalty (small for these robber barons) so Anthropic is destroying them now to conform to the law. The law is bs and Anthropic is run by villains.

In times of substantial technological change, laws tend to lag substantially behind what is actually needed.

And in times of substantial inequality, they lag yet further.