Authored by Jay Rogers via American Greatness,
AI companies won the argument about learning from books. They lost the argument about stealing them. Both sides of this fight have a reason to blur the two.
On July 20, a federal judge in San Francisco gave final approval to the largest publicly reported copyright recovery in American history. Anthropic will pay $1.5 billion to the authors and publishers of 482,460 books, roughly $3,100 a title before fees. A hardcover runs about $30. The other $3,070 is the surcharge for pirating it instead of buying it.
Anthropic won on training. Sourcing sank it. In June 2025, U.S. District Judge William Alsup held that training on lawfully acquired books was fair use, calling the purpose "exceedingly transformative." The company downloaded millions of titles from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror and kept them in a permanent central library. Pirating copies a company could have bought, Alsup wrote, is "inherently, irredeemably infringing."
Here's my thesis. We need a fair use doctrine that protects analysis and refuses to launder piracy. Punish analysis, and we strangle the most useful technology since the trans
