Books, Music, AI, and the Strange Boundaries of Copyright Law

September 26, 2026

I saw a comment somewhere - I don't remember where - that if a book is legally purchased, for example, by an LLM business, they have the right to absorb/use the text, but then they have to destroy the book afterward. Something like that. What about this?

I almost certainly saw a muddled description of the Anthropic copyright case. There's a real grain of truth in it, but it is not a general rule that an AI company may buy a book, train on it, and then must destroy it.

Here is what actually happened.

Anthropic bought millions of physical books, cut off their bindings, scanned them, and created digital copies. The physical books were destroyed during that scanning process. Anthropic retained one digital replacement for each physical copy, rather than keeping both the book and an additional digital copy.

In June 2025, Judge William Alsup ruled that this particular conversion was fair use. His reasoning included these facts:
-Anthropic had legally purchased each physical copy.
-The physical copy was replaced by one digital copy, not multiplied into copies for distribution.
-The digital copy was kept internally and was not provided to the public.
-The format conversion made the collection searchable and easier to store.
-The LLM training itself was considered highly transformative.

The decision summarized the critical circumstances this way: the purchased print copy was destroyed and its digital replacement was not redistributed.
The court’s actual ruling is available here.

So, destruction was relevant to the judge’s conclusion about format shifting, but the ruling did not create a law saying:
Buy book? train AI? destroy book.
It was closer to:
Buy one lawful copy? destroy that copy while converting it into one internal digital replacement.

There was also a completely different group of books. Anthropic had downloaded more than seven million books from pirate libraries such as LibGen and PiLiMi. The judge ruled that building a permanent general-purpose library from those pirated copies was not fair use. Purchasing legitimate copies later did not erase the original infringement.

That part eventually produced a $1.5 billion settlement covering approximately 482,000 works, finally approved on July 20, 2026. Anthropic was required to destroy copies of the covered works obtained through the pirate libraries, subject to legal evidence-preservation requirements. That may be where the comment’s “they have to destroy the book afterward” language came from.
Reuters reported the final approval here.

The larger question is still not completely settled. One federal trial-court decision found Anthropic’s particular training use fair, but it does not establish that every AI company has an automatic right to train on every legally purchased book. Fair use is decided from the specific purpose, copying method, outputs, market effects, and other circumstances. The US Copyright Office likewise says different AI uses must be evaluated separately and that there is no simple universal formula.
Its current AI-training report explains that distinction.

In blunt terms: owning a copy lets you read it, resell it, burn it, or apparently feed it through an industrial book guillotine. It does not automatically transfer the copyright or grant unrestricted rights to reproduce and exploit the text. Anthropic won the narrower fair-use argument because of exactly how it acquired, converted, and used those lawful copies.

Isn't this similar to the copyright and copying of recordings? Such as music? It's okay to make a copy for personal use, but not for resale.

Yes, the analogy is quite close, especially when dealing with a change of format.

If you legally buy a music CD, you own that physical CD. You can:
-Listen to it.
-Sell or give away that particular CD.
-Ordinarily copy its music to your computer or phone for your own listening.
-Not make copies and sell, distribute, or upload them for others.

The same basic idea influenced the Anthropic ruling:
Anthropic legally acquired one physical copy, converted it into one digital copy, and kept that replacement for internal use.

The judge treated that as analogous to copying a CD onto a computer, a process often called format shifting or space shifting. Destroying the printed book strengthened the analogy because Anthropic ended with one usable copy rather than both a physical original and a digital duplicate.

There are two different legal principles involved, however.

First sale permits you to resell, lend, give away, or destroy the particular CD or book you bought. It does not give you copyright ownership or a general right to reproduce the contents. The Copyright Office emphasizes that first sale restricts the copyright holder’s distribution right, not the separate reproduction right.
Copyright Office explanation

Personal music copying receives additional protection from the Audio Home Recording Act, which prohibits copyright-infringement actions based on certain noncommercial consumer recording.
17 U.S.C. § 1008
Even that is narrower and more technically complicated than the usual “personal copies are legal” summary suggests.

The major difference is the purpose. When you copy a CD onto your phone, you are simply listening to the same recording in a more convenient format. Anthropic was not merely reading the digital books. It was using the text commercially to construct an LLM. The judge therefore had to decide separately whether:

Converting the purchased book into a digital replacement was fair use.
Using the text to train the LLM was fair use.

He decided that both were fair uses in Anthropic’s particular case, but for different reasons. The digital conversion was essentially a one-for-one format change. The training was considered transformative because the resulting model did not simply provide readers with replacement copies of the books.

So the comparison is sound, with this refinement:

Buying the item permits ownership and disposal of that copy. Making a private format-shifted copy may be protected. Commercially processing the contents requires an additional copyright analysis.

And resale is not quite the dividing line. You can legally resell the original CD or book. What you cannot do is retain the ripped music or scanned book while selling the original, because then you have effectively turned one purchased copy into two. That is precisely why destruction of Anthropic’s printed copies mattered to the judge.