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.
But nobody was ever going to that, not when there are billions in VC dollars at stake for whoever moves fastest. Everybody will simply risk the fine, which tends to not be anywhere close to enough to have a deterrent effect in the future.
That is like saying Uber would have not had any problems if they just entered into a licensing contract with taxi medallion holders. It was faster to just put unlicensed taxis on the streets and use investor money to pay fines and lobby for favorable legislation. In the same way, it was faster for Anthropic to load up their models with un-DRM'd PDFs and ePUBs from wherever instead of licensing them publisher by publisher.
And thank god they did. There was no perfectly legal channel to fix the taxi cartel. Now you don't even have to use Uber in many of these places because taxis had to compete - they otherwise never would have stopped pulling the "credit card reader is broken" scam, taking long routes on purpose, and started using tech that made them more accountable to these things as well as harder for them to racially profile passengers. (They would infamously pretend not to see you if they didn't want to give you service back when you had to hail them with an IRL gesture instead of an app..)
Now, I see people at the airport walk over to the pickup lot, joining a crowd of others furiously messing with their phones while scanning the area for presumably their driver.
All the while the taxis waiting immediately outside the exit door were $2 more expensive, last time I checked.
I lived in SF when Uber started. We used to call Veteran's Cab because they were the only company that wouldn't ditch on the way to pick you up, but it was completely normal to wait more than an hour for a cab in the dark hinterlands of 24th and Dolores or the industrial wasteland of 2nd and Folsom. An hour during which you had to be ready to jump as soon as the car arrived. Everybody had at least one black-car driver's cell number for downtown use because if they happened to be free, you could at least get picked up.
Uber would have had a religious following of fanpersons even if all they'd done was an estimated pickup time that was accurate to within 20 minutes.