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AI scanning rulings face new pressure from book-destruction incentives
A June 23, 2025 court order found that turning lawfully purchased print books into non-distributed digital copies can qualify as fair use, but it did not broadly bless destructive scanning or how to handle pirated copies.
A recent case tied to Anthropic’s book scanning work highlights how court reasoning about fair use can intersect with incentives to discard physical copies, according to CryptoSlate.
In a June 23, 2025 order discussed in the reporting, a federal court said Anthropic’s copying to train specific large language models was transformative fair use, based on the record before it.
The same order also addressed the conversion of lawfully purchased print books into non-distributed digital library copies, concluding that the resulting PDFs replaced the purchased books without increasing the library’s copy count.
The court, however, treated Anthropic’s pirated central-library copies differently, denying summary judgment on those materials and leaving those claims for trial, while stopping short of a general license to obtain books by any means or to treat every destructive scan as lawful.