Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use -- but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. [...]

The company spent "many millions of dollars" on this buying and scanning operation, often purchasing used books in bulk. Next, they stripped books from bindings, cut pages to workable dimensions, scanned them as stacks of pages into PDFs with machine-readable text including covers, then discarded all the paper originals. [...]

Archivists long ago established other ways to extract information from paper. For example, The Internet Archive pioneered non-destructive book scanning methods that preserve physical volumes while creating digital copies.

Prior art in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.