"How dare AI companies pirate books to train their AIs! They should be paying for their training data!"

...

"Not like that!"

This bit of clickbait outrage has been making the rounds for weeks now. They're using the standard approach to bulk scanning books. The "rare editions" they're scanning are rare because nobody is interested in them. It's stuff like old guidebooks from a particular town fair in 1970 or a book on crochet in early colonial Kansas or whatever, they were sitting in warehouses and would have eventually been pulped if not bought in bulk. This is their one shot at preservation, frankly. And they're doing this because the law requires them to do it.

Every fucking website has to find a scandalized take about the several companies buying one (1) of every book.

Most of them were equally scandalized when the same companies did the obvious thing and grabbed a shadow library torrent.

Almost none of them recognize that when they demanded things be done properly - that's what this is.