alt Hacker NewsIsn't scanning also a form of copyright infringement? You are making a digital copy of a book, which is the same thing as downloading a book from the internet...
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No, there is a famous law case to prove that's allowed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,....
Copyright protects the presentation of knowledge, not the knowledge itself, which is uncopyrightable in almost all jurisdictions.
As long as the book was a legal copy, that is allowed legally.
Here we have a 15% limit on scanning for fair use
As long as it is destructive, and the digital copy is access-restricted to equal the licenses or physical copies destroyed, then it falls under fair use.
I'm pretty sure every book I've seen has a page that says you're not allowed to copy/scan/photograph it.
I think that we can run a perhaps silly thought experiment.
Suppose that I have a nearly perfect memory and I could remember all the books I read. Suppose also that I have a million year life span so I could read 7 million books. Then, what happens if at the end of all of those years, or at any earlier moment I answer questions from people and I exploit commercially the knowledge I gathered reading those books? Would my reading those books be study or copyright infringement? Remember the nearly perfect memory hypotheses.
Of course it's a bit silly because the time to train a LLM and the time I need to read all those books is different by orders of magnitude and that changes the perspective. Who would complain with me today if their heirs lose some money on 7 million AD? Who would even notice that I started that million years long endeavor. Who's going to be there to ask me questions by then? Humans? Birds? Lizards? And I can say that I am studying like everybody else before me, but does an LLM study? And I am sure there are many other nuances.
Anyway, I don't think that scanning is any different than photons hitting my retina. The difference is in what happens next: the faithfulness of memory, the amount of knowledge, the speed of accumulating it. After all a huge amount of quantity can become quality.