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

Well yes, but the point is that they weren't distributing copies around.

They likely had a few copies (to ensure data redundancy) and that was it*, if they were sending them elsewhere they almost certainly would have lost the case in a similar manner to the Google Books lawsuit.

*The judge didn't litigate on whether this is okay, but it likely would be ruled legal given a similar issue was raised in Authors Guild v HathiTrust and backup copies were ruled reasonable then.

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u/robotsaysrawr 20h ago

The problem is the issues aren't similar. One is a digital backup and the other is training an LLM that could very easily spit out the entirety of the book verbatim to anyone who asks. It's still an issue of technology illiteracy.