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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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[-] 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.

this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026

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