Maybe begging the question here. If a physical book is rare, doesn't that mean it wasn't available to many in the first place? It seems to me providing its knowledge via LLM, even if it's a private company, benefits more people than if it were sitting in a library somewhere maybe read by a few, or worse in some private collector's set.

I can't help feeling there's some hypocrisy or something here with this call to be outraged at AI companies and scan books now. What about before when they were still mostly locked away from the world? It's only when they're actually being made available to - at least a part of - the broader world that they're a "cultural heritage" worth preserving. Shame.