I wholeheartedly believe the AI controversy on destroying books is being stirred up by the companies themselves.

Copyright law requires you destroy a book, if you format shift it. If you digitise, you need to ensure its not a "copy" but that your one license went with the book.

So... If enough people complain, they get to pressure for copyright changes. Which will just so happen to have massive carveouts to let them do whatever they want.

"You own a particular physical copy; you don't possess an abstract transferable 'one-copy license."

There is nothing that says you have to destroy something because you scanned it. This argument has been confusing me since I've seen this pop up.

Edit; despite the above, looking at the court documents from the Anthropic case, this is pretty close to what they were arguing: “we are just transferring the physical form we purchased, therefore it is legal.”

I still dont think there is a requirement to destroy the book, but since there isn’t a reason to store the book and they can’t sell it, they probably just took the cheapest route. It might be worth an argument that they only purchased the right to use the digital copies while the physical copies exist, but I’m in over my head from a copyright standpint

Since when do AI companies care about the law? Most of their training data is pirated.