Someone correct me if I am wrong but aren't these works being digitized and transformed in a way to make a profit off of the information that is included in these works?
It would be one thing for an individual to make person use of one or more books, but you got to have some special blindness not to see that a for-profit company's use of this information to improve a for-profit model is clearly going against what copyright stands for.
Simply, if the models can think then it is no different than a person reading many books and building something new from their learnings. Digitization is just memory. If the models cannot think then it is meaningless digital regurgitation and plagiarism, not to mention breach of copyright.
The quotes "consistent with copyright's purpose in enabling creativity and fostering scientific progress." and "Like any reader aspiring to be a writer" say, from what I can tell, that the judge has legally ruled the model can think as a human does, and therefore has the legal protections afforded to "creatives."
No, that's fallacious. Using anthropomorphic words to describe a machine does not give it the same kinds of rights and affordances we give real people.
First, Authors argue that using works to train Claude’s underlying LLMs was like using
works to train any person to read and write, so Authors should be able to exclude Anthropic
from this use (Opp. 16). But Authors cannot rightly exclude anyone from using their works for
training or learning as such. Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts. They may need
to pay for getting their hands on a text in the first instance. But to make anyone pay
specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory,
each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.
For centuries, we have read and re-read books. We have admired, memorized, and internalized
their sweeping themes, their substantive points, and their stylistic solutions to recurring writing
problems.
...
In short, the purpose and character of using copyrighted works to train LLMs to generate
new text was quintessentially transformative. Like any reader aspiring to be a writer,
Anthropic’s LLMs trained upon works not to race ahead and replicate or supplant them — but
to turn a hard corner and create something different. If this training process reasonably
required making copies within the LLM or otherwise, those copies were engaged in a
transformative use.
[1] https://authorsguild.org/app/uploads/2025/06/gov.uscourts.ca...