Anthropic cut up millions of used books, and downloaded 7M pirated ones – judge

Pirate and pay the fine is probably hell of a lot cheaper than individually buying all these books. I'm not saying this is justified, but what would you have done in their situation?

Sayi "they have the money" is not an argument. It's about the amount of effort that is needed to individually buy, scan, process millions of pages. If that's done for you, why re-do it all?

Isn't "pirating" a felony with jail time, though? That's what I remember from the FBI warning I had to see at the beginning of every DVD I bought (but not "pirated" ones).