Comment by paxys

> Is it a “loophole” that you can buy something and burn it? That’s how property ownership works.

It sounds shocking if you're missing the context and only rely on the blogspam which is this TechCrunch article.

They aren't buying the books only to destroy them but to build an AI training dataset, which means they're making a digital copy. This becomes a copyright issue. The destruction is the legal loophole that allows them to keep the digital copy as the only copy in circulation and be considered fair use as decided by a judge (see below).

The concept of ownership means you can do anything you want with the object, the book in this case. Not with the content, like make or distribute copies. The scanning machines are cutting the spine of the book, feeding the pages to scanners, and then destroying the physical copy.

Anthropic's version of this was Project Panama [1]. Quoting from the page:

> Judge William Alsup ruled that the destruction and digitization of legally purchased books constituted fair use

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Panama

No, that's not the loophole. The loophole is that a US federal judge recently ruled that scanning a book for the purpose of training an AI is "fair use" and hence legal _if and only if_ the book is destroyed in the process. If you retain the original, you would be creating an unauthorized copy, but if the original is destroyed, then it is permissable as format shift: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/jnvwbgqlzpw/...

Sometimes original owner does not know that it is a first edition single copy. For them it is an old book. There have been many cases where owners did not know true value of their antiques.