He learned Java to understand the Oracle v. Google case better. His middle name is Haskell.

> So, continuing to profit--forever--from someone's else work, at scale, without their prior consent, is fair use?

No, that's what they got in trouble for - a lack of consent.

If the author consents, it would have been fine. If they bought the books, then it is fine. Digitisation through destruction, like most book scanning systems. As long as the original work is destroyed during the process, and you actually paid for it, then it is fair use.

If it regurgitates, then the author can sue you again. So you are incentivised to make damn sure it doesn't. That's not covered by fair use.

Its only if the original cannot be accessed anymore, and you paid to get the original. Both must be true, for fair use to hold.

Yeah, I feel like penalties here should be something like 10% of revenue in perpetuity. Then companies might think twice about asking forgiveness instead of permission.

I dunno, ever used a thing you learned from a textbook in your job? Did you have to continue paying for the copy of that knowledge speed on your brain? No, because that's not what copyright is about.

Learning from and building on previous work is civilization. Copyright maximalism is a plague.

Why do they need prior consent? What sort of rent seeking do you want?

Note that they're testing for 100-word passages. This is a level of memorization that avid readers can credibly also reach.

Note also that Sonnet 3.7 had to be jailbroken.

Note also that they got high memorization for a few books that were widely quoted. The books in question can probably also be "retrieved" by putting phrase prefixes into Google, which is probably why Sonnet 3.7 knows them with the precision of a fanboy. Material being widely repeated in the training set is a well-known cause of memorization.