From the way the lawsuit documents tell it, Anthropic turned literally ripping off books into an art form. It used a “hydraulic powered cutting machine” to “neatly cut” the millions of books it got from used book retailers, and then scanned the pages “on high speed, high quality, production level scanners.” Then a recycling company would be scheduled to pick up the eviscerated volumes — because you wouldn’t want to be wasteful, after all.

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books

Because if you buy a physical product you have rights over that copy

Digital, you don't.

So they pirated digital, got in trouble, then pivoted to the waste of buying scanning then making the scans searchable and readable for the AI.

Like, destroying the books is a bad look, the waste of electricity just to circumvent copywriter law is the real bad part.