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World's largest open library calls for volunteers to scan and preserve physical books as AI companies buy, scan, and destroy them — Anna's Archive says ‘time is running out’ as ‘knowledge is permanent (www.tomshardware.com)

submitted 1 day ago by obbeel@kbin.earth to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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As AI tech companies increasingly buy and destroy books to feed to their AI models, Anna's Archive is calling for volunteers to help preserve them for the public record.

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[-] Truscape 41 points 1 day ago

Anna's Archive does have guides for all of that (apart from the legal advice) on their site (use wikipedia to find the right domain).

I don't think you'd want to do so as a university student unless you want to share the same fate as Aaron Swartz though.

[-] Catoblepas 20 points 1 day ago

Surely at least the stuff out of copyright is kosher to scan and share? Which seems like a good area to focus on if they’re being bought up and destroyed

[-] dan@upvote.au 28 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Stuff that's out of copyright isn't an issue though.

The reason AI companies are destroying books is because current US copyright caselaw (most recently the Anthropic lawsuit) doesn't allow books to be copied, but considers it fair use if you transform the format of a legally purchased book (like from print to digital) without creating a new copy. By destroying the original book, they haven't made a copy of it, and so they operate within US law.

This doesn't apply to public domain books (books that are no longer copyrighted) as you can do whatever you want with public domain content.

[-] obbeel@kbin.earth 6 points 1 day ago

Maybe there is a way to do this anonymously? Anna's Archive deals with books new and old, but maybe that 'physical-only' book that has no digital print would be the best place to start?

I remember no-eyes from #ebooks (IRCHighWay) prioritized recommendations of novels (fiction) to expand their available books, so I think that's the safest type of book to scan?

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026

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