Comment by bpodgursky
7 days ago
No.
A judge a while ago decided that as long as the physical copy is destroyed, and "transformed" into an electronic copy, you can do the upload. But if you preserve the physical copy after scanning it, you are in violation of copyright because you "copied" the book.
That's literally the only reason they are trashing them. It's a legal requirement.
Can you find a citation for this? I have heard this claimed rule recently from other people, and I haven't seen this decision (nor do I know what level of court or jurisdiction it might be). This is not a rule that I heard many years ago when working on and adjacent to copyright issues (including book scanning!), although of course the issue has been newly litigated again recently, so there may be new interpretations coming out.
Edit: Someone else linked to an order in Bartz v. Anthropic which appears to emphasize that destroying the original copies improved the defendant's position with respect to the fair use analysis. Is that the decision you're thinking of?
Ah, so I can buy and scan a dvd, destroy it and then legally distribute the legal copy via torrents. Good to know, because that is what the LLM thieves are doing.
Distributing an exact copy of the text would be illegal; if you could get an LLM trained on a book to output the exact copy of the text from the book then that would be illegal as well.
They still made a bunch of copies and reused it to train multiple models after making the first copy. Unless they copy and destroy a book each time they use it as as training sample