My copying and pasting is twofold.

First, in today's environment people will state AI hallucinations as fact or "google it yourself" as the reference. If someone doesn't know where to find that information they're left with the "someone on the net said XYZ".

Secondly, I'm not always certain that if I do provide a link to a large document that people will find the relevant section in there. And second and a halfly, if someone comes back to it in a year or two or five that the link will still be live. I've had situations in the past where I've provided a link and then the domain changes hands and the new owners of the site put up a retroactive robots.txt and make it inaccessible on the wayback machine.

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The question for an AI company that can't return, sell, or donate the material after it has been scanned - are they then to pay to store it in a warehouse indefinitely?

After they've format shifted the content and retained the format shifted content for continued use in training, it becomes at least a very gray area to donate the original.

And even if the books were scanned like Google Books did, and they could donate them to libraries - the libraries don't want those books. These aren't rare books in that people would expect you to wear cotton gloves while handling them... they're books that have mostly disappeared from availability.

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1vugion/the_federal_... provides an example of what is being seen in a used book store:

> I work for a large used bookstore with an online component. We're getting slammed with orders for books like the proceedings of an obscure 1992 Dutch geology conference or $500 festschrifts about D-module applications we would have previously sold to some university library. We've never once had an order for anything anybody would actually want, and most of this shit has sat on our shelves for years, if not decades.

Neutron Radiography: Proceedings of the First World Conference San Diego, California, U.S.A. December 7–10, 1981 is technically a rare book. https://www.amazon.com/Neutron-Radiography-Proceedings-Confe...

If you had a copy of it, I would challenge you to find a library that would accept it as a donation.

In the event that you wanted to read a copy of it, there is a copy of it in the Library of Congress. https://search.catalog.loc.gov/instances/b220c9bd-63ad-5a8b-...