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.
The federal courts are a joke - the supreme court now has at least one justice whose craven corruption is notorious — openly accepting material value (ie bribes) from various parties. The district courts are being stuffed with Trump appointees with the obvious problems that go with that.
The congress is supine. Obviously they cannot act in any meaningful capacity.
We don’t have street level corruption today. But we’ve fired half the civil service, so I doubt that will continue.
Imagine a future where election results are casually and publicly nullified if the people with the guns don't like the result, and no one can do anything about it. Or where you can start a business but if it succeeds and you don't have the right family name it'll be taken from you and you'll be stripped of all you own and possibly put in prison for a while. That's reality in some countries, the US is not there yet, but those are the stakes we're playing for here, and why change needs to happen.
Right now, the President is sending federal troops and occupying cities and just bombed a ship in Venezuela