AI firms are scanning rare books and shredding originals to reduce copyright risk
nptacek · x · 2026-07-28
A reposted thread discusses a report that AI companies are buying rare books in bulk, scanning them with spine-cutting machines, and shredding the originals to reduce copyright risk.
Key points:
- ISBNdb reportedly helps facilitate orders of up to a million books while keeping buyers anonymous.
- Pre-2022 books are considered especially valuable because they are less likely to contain AI-generated text.
- A federal judge has reportedly ruled the practice fair use because only one copy exists at a time after the originals are destroyed.
- Anthropic is said to have hired a former Google Books partnerships lead to source “all the books in the world.”
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