1. Fuck AI
2. This judge’s point is absolutely true:

“You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products,” Chhabria said. “You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person’s work, and you’re saying that you don’t even have to pay a license to that person.”

3. AI apologists’ response to that will invariably be “but it’s sampling from millions of people at once, not just that one person”, which always sounds like the fractions-of-a-penny scene
4. Fuck copyright
5. A ruling against fair use for AI will almost certainly deal collateral damage to perfectly innocuous scraping projects like linguistic analysis. Even despite their acknowledgement of the issue:

To prevent both harms, the Copyright Office expects that some AI training will be deemed fair use, such as training viewed as transformative, because resulting models don’t compete with creative works. Those uses threaten no market harm but rather solve a societal need, such as language models translating texts, moderating content, or correcting grammar. Or in the case of audio models, technology that helps producers clean up unwanted distortion might be fair use, where models that generate songs in the style of popular artists might not, the office opined.

6. We really need to regulate against AI — right now — but doing it through copyright might be worse than not doing it at all