> US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy. What

> US copyright law (currently, sorta, kinda) requires that only one copy of the book you purchased exist. If you scan it, you must destroy the other copy. What's the "sorta, kinda" as you understand it? Has any judge, or law, created a requirement to destroy copies? From what I understand, depending on the purpose, making digital copies may be fair use if it's "transformative". In a decision involving Google's book search feature, the court's decision highlighted that the amount of text displayed in the product was limited and not a "significant market substitute" [2]. The AI firms aren't trying to show you a digital copy of the books, and in a bunch of contexts already, if their product regurgitates too much verbatim text, that's going to be a liability (e.g. educational uses and plagiarism). I've also tried prompting LLMs to finish a paragraph from inside a novel from a well-known author, and they have not been able to get the next sentence typically. You can't easily and with confidence just extract back a book. I have not tried the experiment of seeing how many tokens you need to spend before a books is reproduced and what the cost is relative to the original work -- and you would already need the digital text to recognize when you had succeeded. What's transformative? Previously the courts have said that scanning to offer a search product was transformative, given some limitations on how much of the matching book is shown to the user. I think there's a decent argument that training an AI model is at least as transformative as search indexing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTrust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._HathiTr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.#Second_Circuit_appeal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,...