When that approach seemed too complicated (or, as the court decision phrases: “Anthropic became ‘not so gung ho about’ training on pirated books ‘for legal reasons’”), Anthropic turned to destructive scanning. Should we be surprised that destroying printed texts seemed easier to Anthropic than working with their human authors? Anthropic took printed books and scanned them, “transforming” or remediating them into a new, electronic format. They then disposed of the original printed copy: the “destructive” part of destructive scanning. In the court’s images, stacks of books await destructive scanning.