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

Here is how individuals are treated for massive copyright infringement:

https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-de...

> illegally copying and selling pirated software

This is very different to what Anthropic did. Nobody was buying copies of books from Anthropic instead of the copyright holder.

At the very least, they should have purchased the originals once

Yeah, people have gone to jail for a few copies of content. Taking that large of a corpus and getting off without penalty would be a farce of the justice system.

Bad decisions should not be repeated in the name of fair application.

They actually should, because generally an equal playing field is more important that correct law.

As an extreme example, consider murder. Obviously it should be illegal, but if it's legal for one group and not for another, the group for which it's illegal will probably be wiped out, having lost the ability to avenge deaths in the group.

It's much more important that laws are applied impartially and equally than that they are even a tiny bit reasonable.

I think GP's point is that you should always seek to apply the law correctly, hopefully setting precedent for its correct application for everyone in the future.