You've probably seen the headline of a Microsoft employee calling AI scraping "the largest theft of labor in human history." Case closed, right. No. As Mike Masnick says, "An exec's statement doesn't change the underlying facts: fair use isn't copyright infringement, and even when something is infringement, it still isn't theft." I know that a lot of people disagree with this, on both counts. But it is well established that, for example, "the use of the books at issue to train Claude and its precursors was exceedingly transformative and was a fair use under Section 107 of the Copyright Act." There may be an argument for changing the law, or creating new law, though I don't think so. But training AI on legally acquired text is perfectly legal under current law, and it should stay that way, not for the sake of Anthropic and OpenAI, but for the rest of us.
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