Why AI companies pulp the books they buy
Anthropic bought millions of print books, cut off their bindings, scanned the pages, and threw the paper away. In Bartz v. Anthropic, a federal judge ruled that this was fair use. He rejected the same defense for the company’s library of pirated books, and those claims ended in a $1.5 billion settlement, approved in July 2026.
The money made the headlines. I keep coming back to the paper. Destroying it helped Anthropic’s case. Keeping the books for someone else to read would have meant defending a shakier one. Why should copyright give anyone a reason to prefer the bin?
I spent an evening arguing this with Claude. I came in thinking it was a money problem. I left thinking it was both, and that only Congress can fix the legal half.
The law does not say “destroy the book”
Buying a book gives you an object you can resell, lend, or give away under first sale. It does not let you scan it. Scanning is a reproduction, so you need permission or an exception such as fair use. There is no statutory right to turn a book you own into an ebook.
Fair use is a four-factor balancing test, decided after the fact by a judge. In Bartz, Judge William Alsup leaned on the fact that each digital copy replaced a destroyed print copy and never left the company. He did not order the books destroyed, and he did not rule that keeping them would have been illegal. But destruction was a fact he relied on again and again, and a company reading the ruling now has a reason to pulp its originals even when it could scan them intact.
The Internet Archive’s 2024 defeat is a different case. It lent full digital copies to the public without permission, in competition with licensed ebooks. It does not say that keeping a paper original next to a private scan is infringement. It does show how little patience courts have once copies start leaving the building.
The money half
This is where I had to concede. Loose pages go through a sheet feeder. An intact book needs its pages turned. At millions of books, that gap is the whole budget, and no exception in the statute makes a page-turning scanner cheaper. Some companies would cut the bindings regardless, and I can’t claim a better law would have saved Anthropic’s books.
What a better law can do is give whoever keeps the books intact a clean path to donating them. They would still need a willing library and someone to pay for sorting and shipping. Those costs are real. Legal doubt about keeping the scan needn’t be one more.
The argument I dropped
My first draft framed this as books lost to humanity. Claude talked me out of leading with that, and I think rightly. The books in a bulk purchase are mostly used copies of mass-printed titles. Pulping one leaves thousands of siblings, and a sharp reader says “so what, it’s a used copy of a bestseller” and closes the tab.
So the claim is narrower. Pulping a readable book does not erase the work, but it does leave one fewer copy for someone to read, and that is enough to ask what the destruction was for. Rare editions and annotated copies exist in any bulk lot, but the argument shouldn’t hinge on proving one went through the scanner. An ordinary readable book is worth passing on too.
The redundant waste
Now picture several companies following the same recipe. Each buys the same book, cuts it apart, and scans it. Several destroyed books, several files of the same text. The fair-use ruling gives none of them a right to copy another’s library, so each must build its own.
None of that is technically necessary. A rights holder can license one digital source to many customers, and most of these titles already exist as ebooks. Agreeing on rights, prices, and access rules is a bigger project than the exception I’m asking for below. It still beats feeding another copy of the same book through another scanner.
What I am asking
If you are American, ask Congress for a format-shifting exception: the owner of a lawfully acquired book may scan it for their own use, or for an organization’s internal library, and may then donate the original without deleting the scan. Nothing more. No right to distribute or lend the files, and no ruling on what further uses, AI training included, are allowed.
There is a serious objection. If each successive owner scans the book and passes it on, one physical copy could support many retained digital copies. Authors and publishers are right to worry about that, and a real bill would have to address repeated circulation, and whether commercial libraries need different conditions or compensation. Calling the change small doesn’t make those questions go away.
Congress already writes copying exceptions this specific. Section 108 lets libraries and archives make copies under detailed conditions. It is not a ready answer for private owners or AI companies, but it proves we can do better than “argue fair use and see who wins.”
I don’t have a finished bill. I have a test for one. When someone has paid for a book and scanned it, keeping that book available for another reader should never leave them worse off than throwing it away.
