Afaik, format shifting for convince is legal so long as you're Anthropic.
It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.
I think the key part was they scanned the books then destroyed the originals. I suppose the analog here would be to log into Amazon and delete the purchased ebooks.
I think they would've been allowed to do the scanning even without destroying the originals. AFAIK destroying the originals was just done to facilitate scanning — they needed the pages to be loose sheets, not bound.
They scanned then shredded the books so that publishers couldn't claim an unauthorized copy was made. All Anthropic did was a format shift which is allowed.
It was mostly a passing mention in the lawsuit against them where the damages are just for pirating books they didn't also buy. The fact that they bought used books and scanned them since its cheaper than ebooks was allowed by the court.