It’s important in the fair use assessment to understand that the training itself is fair use, but the pirating of the books is the issue at hand here, and is what Anthropic “whoopsied” into in acquiring the training data.
Buying used copies of books, scanning them, and training on it is fine.
Rainbows End was prescient in many ways.
I'm so over this shift in America's business model.
Original Silicon Valley model, and generally the engine of American innovation/growth/wealth equality for 200 years: Come up with a cool technology, build it in your garage, get people to fund it and sell it because it's a better mousetrap.
New model: Still come up with a cool idea, still get it funded and sold, but the idea involves committing crime at a staggering scale (Uber, Google, AirBnB, all AI companies, long list here), and then paying your way out of the consequences later.
Look some of these laws may have sucked, but having billionaires organize a private entity that systematically breaks them and gets off with a slap on the wrist, is not the solution. For one thing, if innovation requires breaking the law, only the rich will be able to innovate because only they can pay their way out of the law. For another, obviously no one should be able to pay their way out of following the law! This is basic "foundations of society" stuff that the vast majority of humans agree on in terms of what feels fair and just, and what doesn't.
Go to a country which has really serious corruption problems, like is really high on the corruption index, and ask the people there what they think about it. I mean I live in one and have visited many others so I can tell you, they all hate it. It not only makes them unhappy, it fills them with hopelessness about their future. They don't believe that anything can ever get better, they don't believe they can succeed by being good, they believe their own life is doomed to an unappealing fate because of when and where they were born, and they have no agency to change it. 25 years ago they all wanted to move to America, because the absence of that crushing level of corruption was what "the land of opportunity" meant. Now not so much, because America is becoming more like their country.
This timeline ends poorly for all of us, even the corrupt rich who profit from it, because in the future America will be more like a Latin American banana republic where they won't be able to leave their compounds for fear of getting Luigi'ed. We normal people get poverty, they get fear and death, everyone loses. The social contract is collapsing in front of our eyes.
If we were to use an entirely neutral term for it, in the case of something like Uber, really it's the privatization of control. The regulation around taxi cabs was a matter of public policy, Uber brought in its own version of this, broke the laws where it saw fit, spent money to get new laws written, basically the decisionmaking was no longer in the hands of a public institution.
Now there is a fair criticism to be made that the public institutions governing taxi cabs were sclerotic and shitty, but if you trust Uber for one nanosecond to do what's in your best interest when it doesn't align with theirs, you're a fool, and giving a private company such a huge global footprint in what was formerly a public affair is probably going to lead to tears. They absolutely will seek rents, find them and charge them to you sooner or later, that is what's in their DNA as a private company, barring effective regulation this only ends in one way.
Where we are now is we are so deep down the rabbit hole of profit chasing that there is zero interest in maintaining or strengthening our public institutions. Why would you do that? How does it get you paid? It doesn't and everyone thinks society and culture are just big jokes that don't get you paid. So no one really cares to uphold them anymore, everyone's feasting on the corpse of the civil society while it rots.