  > the legal fees are almost certainly being paid on contingency and not out of pocket.

The legal fees for this lawsuit. Not the legal feels for anyone who went and talked to a lawyer suspecting their material was illegitimately used.

You're treating the system as isolated when it is not.

  > no opportunity cost or lost future income here because this is piracy not theft.

I think you are confused. Yes, it is piracy but not like the typical piracy most of us do. There's no loss in pirating a movie if you would never have paid to see the movie in the first place.

But there's future costs here as people will use LLMs to generate books, which is competition. The cost of generating such a book is much cheaper, allowing for a much cheaper product.

  > They only lost the revenue from the sale of a single copy.

In your effort to simplify things you have only complicated them.

▲ terminalshort 3 days ago | parent [-]

You are not entitled to protection from future competition, only from loss of sales of your current work. You are not ever entitled to legal fees you pay if you don't file a suit.

▲ godelski 3 days ago | parent [-]

  > You are not entitled to protection from future competition

What do you think patents, copyright, trademarks, and all this other stuff is even about?

There's "Statutory Damages" which account for a wide range of things[0].

Not to mention you just completely ignored what I argued!

Seriously, you've been making a lot of very confident claims in this thread and they are easy to verify as false. Just google some of your assumptions before you respond. Hell, ask an LLM and they'll tell you! Just don't make assumptions and do zero amount of vetting. It's okay to be wrong, but you're way off base buddy.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_damages

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vidarh 3 days ago | parent [-]

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jimmydorry 3 days ago | parent [-]

Copyright protects you from market substitutions (e.g. someone taking your IP, and offering an alternative to your work). Being trained on your IP, it could certainly be argued that users would no longer need to purchase your book.

"Future competition" is a loosely worded way of saying this.

	▲	vidarh 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		"It could be argued" but the judge in this case has already ruled that the training does not violate copyright. Market substitution only comes into play to determine fair use if copyright has already been infringed.