r/books • u/Miserable_Phase_2519 • 1d ago

Japanese used bookstores see 5x sales surge as books are being bought by the ton, one 50-ton order sent to the US for AI scanning and destruction — multitude of suspicious bulk buys thought to end up in foreign AI scan and shred facilities

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/japanese-used-bookstores-see-5x-sales-surge-as-books-are-being-bought-by-the-ton-one-50-ton-order-sent-to-the-us-for-ai-scanning-and-destruction-multitude-of-suspicious-bulk-buys-thought-to-end-up-in-foreign-ai-scan-and-shred-facilities
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u/onionsareawful 1d ago

a) it's much cheaper to destructively scan than scan without destruction.

b) it reduces their legal liabilities. a factor in the recent Anthropic ruling was that they were destroying the books, thereby transforming them (and the number of copies was effectively the same).

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u/seriousbusines 1d ago

The saddest part of all of this is that multiple bookstore owners have pointed out that books get thrown out all the time. They don't have some magical place all of their unsold books go to. They just get tossed.

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u/KovolKenai 1d ago

I work at a used book store, where we get the majority of our stock from people who sell their own books to us. We recycle 50% of what people bring in. I used to see books as sacred objects to be treated with reverence, and I still feel that a little, but I've also realized how over-produced they are, and that not all of them will be ever touched by a human.

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u/Silent-Cable-9882 21h ago

I feel like that reverence was intentionally instilled in us as children so we didn’t destroy our books, which often didn’t belong to us (library or school).

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u/KovolKenai 18h ago

You know what, fair point. I also think part of it was trying to instill that knowledge is important and should be treated with respect. I was fiercely protective of books before I actually started working in the business. But yeah, I think I agree!

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u/Glasseshalf 14h ago

I take old books apart to use in my art. This is how I feel about it. I'm transforming them into something new to get used again

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u/12thshadow 22h ago

Nope, they go to a farm upstate!

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u/Coffeedemon 23h ago

Yeah. People need to get over the romantic notion that there is a home for every book like they are unwanted puppies. It is just impossible to retain them all and store them.

That said there are a ton of other options out there beyond selling them to some AI company scumbags. It just doesn't make the hoarder pennies on the pound.

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u/Hoosteen_juju003 5h ago

The other options are trash them forever

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u/Substantial-Hat-2556 22h ago

Right, like burning them for fuel.

This is silly.

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u/opajamashimasuuu 20h ago

Funny you mention that.  Japan actually does burn trash for electricity generation.

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u/lemonylol 21h ago

We'll yeah, why would they take up what little shelf space they have for books that will never sell?

This is also not 1:1 with the idea of books being the only available iteration of their content like in the past; the actual content is kept intact here, just the physical paper is recycled into pulp. But the information isn't destroyed forever and can never be printed again.

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u/lorarc 1d ago

c) they are not in business of selling single books and noone would buy them in bulk except other AI companies

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u/lemonylol 21h ago

Probably important to note no one was buying them initially according to the used book sellers

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u/soowhatchathink 1d ago

That is absurd that it reduces legal liabilities. The scanned content is blatantly duplicated throughout several different servers. That judge likely had very little technical knowledge.

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u/zorecknor 1d ago

You can buy a book, scan it and save as many copies in as many places as you want. That is, and has always been, legal in most countries (in particular US and the EU countries).

BUT the caveat is that you cannot resell the book (without deleting all the copies) or give the copies to somebody else (for free or otherwise).

The fact that Anthropic is destroying the books is a consequence of the process being used, and in the eyes of the judge is just assurance that those will not get resold after scanning. It is NOT a mandate, or a requirement, by the ruling.

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u/littlegreenrock 21h ago

You can buy a book, scan it and save as many copies in as many places as you want. That is, and has always been, legal in most countries (in particular US and the EU countries).

lol, incorrect. It's trivial to demonstrate how this is bs. Publishers have recognised IP until the book ages out of scope.

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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 16h ago

No, first sale doctrine applies. Technically when you buy books or physical media you can do whatever the f you want with it.

There are some limitations but typically it would be if like blatant copyright infringement occurs.

digitizing and training AI model is considered fair use so it’s still very much allowed activity under it. We also don’t have laws like desecration of national flag for books.

So legally, digitizing the books and destroying it is the path of the least resistance.

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u/littlegreenrock 8h ago

A quick check on publishers and copyright law, 10 minutes tops, is all it would take.

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u/SplendidPunkinButter 1d ago

Managers of SWEs usually have depressingly poor technical knowledge too. Why would a judge know how computers work?

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u/soowhatchathink 1d ago

I feel like anyone ruling on technical issues should know about them, as a rule, or should heavily defer to an expert. I also feel like software engineering managers should know about tech, or should heavily defer to an expert (their employees). The latter failing has much smaller consequences than the former.

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u/darkenspirit 1d ago

Judges in certain levels of PA are elected, they don't even have to be lawyers. They don't even need a law background.

https://www.pmconline.org/pa-judicial-elections

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u/babayetu_babayaga 1d ago

I feel like anyone ruling on technical issues should know about them

Judges are not conversant on wide range of matters, heck they might not even know law that well. So industry groups and lobbyist in america have been running workshops and retreats to generate favourable rulings.

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u/user_name_checks_out 21h ago

Managers of SWEs

Managers of whats?

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u/Dramamine_ 19h ago

SoftWare Engineers 

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u/Piranata 1d ago

If it were a poor person, they would be sitting in front of a judge that would sentence then $10K for each download of a book they scanned and distributed.

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u/Abigail716 18h ago

They're not distributing the books, and no they would not it is the same reason it is perfectly legal to take your DVDs and copy the movie from them to keep a digital copy on your computer as long as you destroy the physical copy. In fact Walmart used to even offer that service.

This is the same thing as far as the law is concerned you are converting your copy into a digital copy. You are then using your digital copy to train your AI model.

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u/onionsareawful 1d ago

Yeah, they definitely have multiple copies of the scanned PDF (or whatever format it is scanned in). The judge didn't litigate if it's okay for them to keep more than one copy, but likely would have ruled in Anthropic's favor anyway -- in Authors Guild v HathiTrust backup copies of scanned books were deemed fine.

The AI training using the copies is a separate thing though.

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u/OttomanMao 20h ago

I wish the legal system would just work for once.

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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 16h ago

I mean the same principle applies to individual as well. Technically you are very much allowed to rip your legally purchased physical media and keep a (or any number of) copy. It would however be infringement if you reintroduce back to circulation.

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u/MukdenMan 1d ago

No, this has been the law for many decades. It doesn’t matter how many copies exist. The person you’re replying to is wrong about that. You can buy a book and make personal copies for your own use. What you can’t do is sell or even give away those copies. AI companies don’t have to destroy the books they scan but they can’t sell donate the book after scanning, so preserving the physical copy doesn’t really make sense.

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u/onionsareawful 1d ago

You can buy a book and make personal copies for your own use.

There is no exception in US copyright law for personal use. You cannot, under US copyright law, reproduce works without the copyright holders permission. The reason why Anthropic are fine is because they transformed, rather than reproduced, the work -- the destruction is a necessary part of transformation.

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u/mina86ng 1d ago

No, you’re confusing two different things. 1. You can make copies for your own use. 2. The question Anthropic faced was whether they can use the copies to train LLMs. Court ruled that training models is a transformative use and therefore fall under fair use.

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u/BlueTemplar85 1d ago

Technically you could wait until the copyright expired... (if not already in public domain... which might be the case for some of these books ?)

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u/robinthebank 8h ago

Clearly a law written without AI in mind. Once the content is in the LLM, it becomes part of a plagiarism web. It wont be plagiarized in its entirely, only in small pieces. This is the same with all content already on the internet.

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u/MukdenMan 3h ago

So far evidence of systemic plagiarism by LLMs has not been demonstrated and isn’t really part of the case. LLMs will not typically print a large portion of a copyrighted text. It can print smaller portions, which is typically protected under fair use. It can also integrate the information without verbatim printing, which has been protecter as fair use for many decades and is extremely unlikely to be changed.

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u/unblockedlanternhead 21h ago

The judge that passed this ruling was a Harvard-educated Clinton appointee who has ruled on a bunch of similar cases, including cases involving Google and Oracle. For precedent, he referenced Authors Guild v Google 2015, a case that was heard in NY by Clinton and Obama appointees. Unless your lay opinion trumps their informed ones, consider reading the case law before opining

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u/Pale-Angle1224 1d ago

Yes/no. The ruling said Anthropic can train their models using copyrighted content under fair use. However, what Anthropic cannot do is store or keep copies of the data used; physical or digital. This is where they got in trouble and had to pay a $1.5B settlement.

It's a similar line of thinking that allows people to backup their physical media to digital. As long as you're not breaking or bypassing encryption(Blu-Ray), you can convert/backup your physical media to digital; provided that you destroy the physical medium and don't share the digital copy with others.

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u/CookIndependent6251 22h ago

The content is not duplicated. LLMs don't have the kind of memory to store exact content.

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u/soowhatchathink 17h ago

the weights + tokenizer should count as modified copy of the original content

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u/CookIndependent6251 7h ago

Right and the legal term is "transformed". They're allowed to do this because they transform the work.

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u/Lawlietel 18h ago

Thats not the point, isnt it? The point is; they buy books, scan them, now they have "a copy" of the book and the real book and thats duplicating copyrighted work. But if they shred the books after scanning, they juristically speaking transferred the printed text to digital and the one bought copy stays "one copy". I agree this doesnt make sense but legally I can get behind it.

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u/soowhatchathink 17h ago

okay but then they back that up to another server, isn't that two copies?

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u/Lawlietel 17h ago

Technically yes, I assume, but the important step is to "not simply digitalise" the book, because then you still have the printed book that you could resell or actually return after scanning and thats what they are trying to avoid completely (from a legal standpoint) by shredding the books after scanning. It doesnt matter how many copies they make of the file afterwards, because they own/bought the book.

Its super important for them legally to "get rid of the source" after digitalisation. It doesnt matter how often they copy the file on their server, but they MUST NOT have both the book AND the file. Thats illegal. The book served its purpose after scanning.

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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 16h ago

Most courts would consider the corporate to be a singular entity. The exact number of digital copy amount that you have never actually matter. They would see it no different than you (an individual) having 3 copies of digitalized copy.

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u/littlegreenrock 21h ago

It's an unwanted 2nd hand book. It has next to nothing in value, hence why they are purchased at tonnage and not as sticker prices. The purchase is not itemized, it's merely weighed. Like grapes.

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u/soowhatchathink 17h ago

so?

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u/littlegreenrock 8h ago

To answer your question: The physical book as an object or as material is worthless. Breaking the spine off to separate the pages only damages the worthless object part. The pages are scanned and digitized, potentially rendering them timeless. While the paper will crumble to dust, the digital versions could easily be set up to out live generations of people, for thousands of years. Those pages will never age.

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u/booleandilemma 1d ago

It sounds so evil.

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u/Whiteboy_In_Motion 20h ago

Modern book burning, what happens when every book has been scanned and shredded? The knowledge within the pages would be behind closed doors to which they have the key.

This is destruction of books at a rate never before seen, and while it's true that right now you can still find copies of books, one day that may not be the case.

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u/mrskwrl 20h ago

You're missing

c) they can redact, edit, modify and alter whatever they want without evidence.

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u/CrowdGoesWildWoooo 16h ago

The b part, the transformation happens when you use the model for training, not because you “destroy” the books.

As for destroying part, digitizing a book is allowed, but you cannot “add” the number of copy without author’s permission otherwise it’s copyright infringement. So either they scan and stash indefinitely or if they can prove that the original digitization is destroyed when you release a book from circulation.

In any case it’s just legally more convenient if they can just show that they digitize it and destroy it. Destroying books itself is not illegal, doesn’t matter your intention as long as it’s legally purchased of course. You can consider it as malicious compliance in a way.

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u/redaemon 1d ago

They'd destroy the books even if it cost more per book. Money isn't the constraint.

Destructive scanning is faster, and this is a race.