[cortesoft]

> If the AI company buys a book and scans it, they are reproducing the book without a license, correct?

No? I think there are a lot more details that need to be known before answering this question. It matters what they do with it after they scan it.

[greensoap]

That is only relevant to whether it is fair use not to whether the copying is an infringement. Fair use is what is called an affirmative defense -- it means that yes what I did was technically a violation but is forgiven. So on technicalities the copying is an infringement but that infringement is "okay" because there is a fair use. A different scenario is if the copyright owner gives you a license to copy the work (like open source licenses). In that scenario the copying was not an infringement because a license exists.

[gpm]

> Fair use is what is called an affirmative defense

Yes

> it means that yes what I did was technically a violation but is forgiven

Not at all. All "affirmative defence" means is that procedural the burden is on me to establish that I was not violating the law. The law isn't "you can't do the thing", rather it is "you can't do the thing unless its like this". There is no violation, there is no forgiveness as there is nothing to forgive, because it was done "like this" and doing it "like this" doesn't violate the law in the first place.

[cortesoft]

If I have have an app on my phone that lets me point my phone at a page to scan, OCR, and read the page out loud to me, it wouldn't even require fair use, would it?