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The settlement addressed unauthorized ebook downloads, not the destructive scanning of lawfully bought physical copies, a distinction now alarming booksellers
Jan Mellström / Unsplash
A federal judge has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement over nearly half a million pirated books. The same litigation also protected a more physical method of feeding its AI systems. Anthropic bought print books, removed their bindings, scanned every page and destroyed the originals.
The legal divide came down to acquisition. The settlement covers books downloaded from LibGen and PiLiMi, while the court treated Anthropic’s one-for-one conversion of purchased books into private digital files as fair use. Training AI models on lawfully acquired material was also considered transformative.
Australian secondhand sellers are now questioning where some of their stock ends up after receiving unusual bulk orders for obscure, decades-old titles. Nothing currently connects those purchases to Anthropic or any other AI company.
Why the court drew a line
Anthropic never lawfully obtained the shadow-library copies, leaving it exposed to copyright claims. The print books, however, came through ordinary commercial channels.
After scanning each book, Anthropic destroyed the physical copy and kept the resulting file inside its private library. The judge treated that as replacing one format with another rather than creating an extra copy for the market, provided the scan wasn’t distributed.
Rachit Agarwal / Digital Trends
It’s a strange outcome. Downloading an unauthorized ebook created liability, while buying the same book and physically dismantling it could qualify as fair use.
How Australian sellers got suspicious
Booksellers reported large orders through AbeBooks and Biblio for local histories and titles that had sat unsold for years. Some shipments filled several boxes, and the buyer appeared unusually relaxed about price.
Zoom Books says it resells and recycles used books through an automated operation handling tens of thousands of copies each day. It denies digitizing them but won’t identify its customers.
That secrecy leaves sellers unable to rule out an AI connection, even though the available evidence doesn’t establish one.
What a scan leaves behind
A digital file can preserve printed words. It won’t necessarily preserve annotations, ownership marks or the history attached to a particular copy.
No rare Australian book has been traced into an AI scanning operation. Proving that link would require a disclosed customer, documented shipment or individually tracked title. Until then, the case shows what copyright law permits and how little visibility sellers retain once a book leaves their shelves.
Paulo Vargas is an English major turned reporter turned technical writer, with a career that has always circled back to…
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