The full headline tries to equate this to The Internet Archive’s recent legal troubles.

For a refresher: The Internet Archive scanned books then shared them online, trying to claim that converting them into digital copies qualified as a derivative work. You don’t have to be a lawyer to see how that claim doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.

The LLM companies are not redistributing the works. They are using them for training. This blog post calls it IP theft, but it has actually been litigated in court already. Using books for training does not qualify as theft or redistribution, even though some people have different opinions about the moral angles.

One of those same lawsuits also extracted a huge settlement from Anthropic for using digital downloads from pirate sites. The conclusion was that the only acceptable way for them to use the books is to buy them and scan them. The courts forced it to be this way.

The current hand-wringing about the destruction of books is based on claims that they’re doing it to rare books that are also valuable. So far nobody has been able to actually provide an example of one of these books that is supposedly ultra-rare, but also valuable, but also only available at one of these book sellers that sells these things in bulk. We’re supposed to assume that one of these books might actually be super valuable but also super rare and also only available at these places they’re buying from.