AI companies destroying books
AI companies destroying books
Posted Sep 3, 2026 10:05 UTC (Thu) by kleptog (subscriber, #1183)In reply to: AI companies destroying books by taladar
Parent article: Debian weighs eight options in vote on LLM usage
From what I understand, it's in the "fair-use" doctrine in the US that allows this destructive scanning in the first place. The act of scanning itself it probably illegal in Europe. So they're buying books in Europe and shipping them to the US to be scanned under the more relaxed laws there. But even in the US, companies putting their scanned books in an archive for public benefit probably kills their "fair-use" defense.
In Europe, museums, libraries and such are allowed to scan their own archives for the public benefit, but the AI companies can't use that exemption. It would arguably be in the public interest to find a way for the scanned book of the AI companies to find its way to archival institutions but that would require a law change (Europe is largely Civil Law, lawsuits won't help you here).
The irony is that there are plenty of institutions that would love to collect every book and digitally archive it and would be legally allowed to do so, but they never have the funding. And the AI companies have money to burn but aren't allowed to do the archiving.