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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Except we know they're going to digitize it, use that data to feed an AI, and never release it to the world.

Legally they can't, they would immediately land in copyright claim hell.

Most people do not support the destruction of books - it seems like the issue in both cases is copyright forcing the destruction and non-release of the scan.

They don't have to destroy the books to scan them. There are techniques for doing it non-destructively, but they're slower and more expensive. It's cheaper to cut the spines off and drop the stack of papers on a flatbed scanner with a paper feeder.

Destroying the original makes it easier to justify that scanning the books is fair use, because you haven't increased the number of copies. See page 16 of https://copyrightalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/Bar... : "This use was even more clearly transformative than those in Texaco, Google, and Sony Betamax (where the number of copies went up by at least one)"

That is just a policy problem. A reactive legislature could fix this in a week, rewriting the law.

For example, require the digitized copies to be put in a public trust where for example libraries can provide these books as digital loans. (Per author adjustment for copyright, if it’s not possible now, store them nonpublically in the trust until later.)

A world where the US Congress can get anything done in a week, much less something that will anger the media cartels that fund their elections and can decide who gets coverage and what kind is not anything like the one we live in.

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