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

If ingesting books into an AI makes Anthropic criminals, then Google et al are also criminals alike for making search indexes of the Internet. Anything published online is equally copyrighted.

Yeah, we can all agree that ingesting books is fair use and transformative, but you gotta own what you ingest, you can't just pirate it.

I can read 100 books and write a book based on the inspiration I got from the 100 books without any issue. However, if I pirate the 100 books I've still committed copyright infringement despite my new book being fully legal/fair use.

I disagree that it has anything to do with copyright. It is at most theft. If I steal a bunch of books from the library, I haven't committed any breach of copyright.

Exactly! If Anthropic is guilty of copyright infringement for the mere act of downloading copyrighted books then so is Google, Microsoft (Bing), DuckDuckGo, etc. Every search engine that exists downloads pirated material every day. They'd all be guilty.

Not only that but all of us are guilty too because I'm positive we've all clicked on search results that contained copyrighted content that was copied without permission. You may not have even known it was such.

Remember: Intent is irrelevant when it comes to copyright infringement! It's not that kind of law.

Intent can guide a judge when they determine damages but that's about it.