They are buying them? That’s actually surprising. I thought stealing them was deemed legal already.
No, that was never the case. Anthropic got told in court that using copyrighted works that they had legally procured for model training was fair use, but since they had used a pirated data set, they got ruled against - there’s no fair use protection for things you haven’t actually bought. Subsequently, they settled that lawsuit for $1.5B
Yeah, thanks for clarifying. I was more saying it with tongue in cheek as a jab at meta’s bittorrenting books, which even itself isn’t settled.
The legal justification being made by these companies to give themselves cover is that because they’re destroying the books after scanning and training the AI, they’re transforming the work, not copying, and thus it is covered by fair use.