> The whole point of copyright is to ensure you're paid for your work.
No. The point of copyright is that the author gets to decide under what terms their works are copied. That's the essence of copyright. In many cases, authors will happily sell you a copy of their work, but they're under no obligation to do so. They can claim a copyright and then never release their work to the general public. That's perfectly within their rights, and they can sue to stop anybody from distributing copies.
We're operating under a model where the owner of the copyright has already sold their work. And while it's within their rights to stipulate conditions of the sale, they did not do that, and fair use of the work as governed under the laws the book was sold under encompasses its conversion into an LLM model.
If the author didn't want their work to be included in an LLM, they should not have sold it, just like if an author didn't want their work to inspire someone else's work, they should not have sold it.
Yeah, this is part of the ruling. The judge decided that the usage was sufficiently transformative and thus fair use. The issue is the authors were selling their works and the company went to a black market instead.
That seems to be a misunderstanding of what's disputed. One fact that is disputed is whether or not the use of the work qualifies as fair use and the judge determined that it is because the result is sufficiently transformative. Another disputed fact is whether the books were acquired legally and the judge determined that they were not. The reason the case is still ongoing is to determine Anthropic's liability for illegally acquiring copies of the books, not to determine the legal status of the LLMs.
No. The point of copyright is that the author gets to decide under what terms their works are copied. That's the essence of copyright. In many cases, authors will happily sell you a copy of their work, but they're under no obligation to do so. They can claim a copyright and then never release their work to the general public. That's perfectly within their rights, and they can sue to stop anybody from distributing copies.