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Copyright, AI, and the Great Illusion and Other AI & Intellectual Property Posts

I just came across this column I had not seen before: Reginald Godwyn,
“Copyright, AI, and the Great Illusion,” Libertarian Alliance (28 June, 2025):

I have just looked at the judgment in Bartz v Anthropic, a case decided in California, but which is likely to have a broader reach by its example. Three authors—a novelist and two non-fiction writers—accused the AI company Anthropic of “stealing” their books to train a large language model named Claude. What the California court ruled was this: training AI on books may well constitute “transformative” use under American copyright law, and thus may not, in itself, be illegal. However, he refused to dismiss the case outright, allowing a trial to proceed on the question of how the books were obtained and stored. The case has been hailed as a copyright milestone. It possibly is that, but is also a symptom of a deeper decay in legal reasoning and our understanding of what machines, and laws, are for.

Let us first deal with the word “stealing.”

Anthropic did not reprint the authors’ books. It did not sell them under its own name. It did not post them online for free. It fed them into an algorithm that adjusted statistical weights across billions of nodes to predict language. This is not theft. It is not publication. And—despite the hyperventilations of rights-holders and their lobbyists—it is not infringement in any meaningful sense. It is the digital equivalent of reading, something no regime has yet dared outlaw outright. But if the plaintiffs and their backers in the publishing world succeed, reading may soon be an activity subject to rent.

What Anthropic did is no different in substance from what any literate man does when he reads a book and allows it to shape the way he speaks. The model, like the man, absorbs patterns. The man is praised for being learned. The machine is sued for being trained.

The idea that reading a book—even by machine—constitutes infringement is as grotesque as accusing a violinist of “stealing” Brahms by practising his Violin Concerto. But grotesque ideas live long when they serve those who collect fees.

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