> I see the current situation a weakening of copyright law, a massive one. And not for the average joe, but instead for the most commercial of entities.

You gonna have to explain this in more detail because it isn't clear to me how you justify this claim. What exactly is being weakened? In what way?

> Some of these companies have downloaded torrents. If a person did what they did, they'd receive billions in fines!!

The one I am assuming you are referring to is Meta, and they are getting sued. They arguably should also be facing criminal charges too under current law.

> Yet they're getting a lesser outcome, as in freaking nothing.

That court case hasn't finished and that doesn't have anything directly to do with LLMs but with our legal system and power/wealth imbalances.

> And of course, there'd be no GPL without copyright law.

I personally strongly prefer MIT to GPL. GPL sort of makes sense as a reaction to copyright law but I don't think GPL justifies the existence or state of copyright law.

> Further, I support sliding scales too.

What does that mean? Just the fines / judgements because along with having to pay, the activity itself must be stopped.

If copyright only prohibited larger entities from copying, it would be less onerous and would make copyright more tolerable, but I don't think that would solve the AI training issue in any way and seems like a tangent.

> an entity scanning all of humankind's knowledge and laughing in our faces.

Knowledge is not copyrightable. If you want to stop this, expanding the power of copyright to make learning/knowing something an infinging activity is one of the worst possible ways to go about it.

> The one I am assuming you are referring to is Meta, and they are getting sued. They arguably should also be facing criminal charges too under current law.

I think your assumption is falling too short, it's not just Meta, it's OpenAI, it's Anthropic, it's Google, and Microsoft, and others.

Like you said, the court case hasn't finished, but there's meddling from the Whitehouse already; I really doubt there's going to be any fair play in this case.