This resurfaced this week (some are calling it “AI book burning”), and I think the legal angle is more interesting than the outrage framing, so here's a neutral breakdown. What's documented: To build a training corpus, Anthropic bought millions of physical print books and “destructively scanned” them — cutting off the bindings, scanning the pages, and discarding the physical copies. It even hired someone who'd previously worked on Google's book-scanning program to acquire books at scale. The...