Is that true? I don’t remember Google Books destroying scanned books and they scanned a ton of books.
Some legislation got pushed through in some jurisdictions to allow them to claim things were "orphaned works".
In UK there's no non-commercial use exception at all.
In USA it can fall under Fair Use, commercial nature is not the sole measure though.
Non-commercial use is not allowed in Brazil. But Brazil does have some fair use exceptions (like most countries that signed the international agreement on intellectual property).
In Brazil it's illegal for me to make copies of a book and distribute it for free on the streets, for example. It's 100% non-commercial, but still illegal.
"Non-commercial" use can relate to one particular aspect of fair use, but there definitely is no blanket "you can copy work for non-commercial use" proviso in copyright law.
It fell off the front page but here's a relevant story from today: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49123300