Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's actually a lot of court activity on this topic, but the law moves slowly and is reluctant to issue injunctions where harm is not obvious. It's more that the law about "one guy decides to pirate twelve movies to watch them at home and share with his buddies" is already well-settled, but the law about "a company pirates 10,000,000 pieces to use as training data for an AI model (a practice that the law already s…
There is a distinction that must be made that very few people do, but thankfully the courts seems to grasp: Training on copyright is a separate claim than skirting payment for copyright. Which pretty much boils down to: "If they put it out there for everyone to see, it's probably OK to train on it, if they put it behind a paywall and you don't pay, the training part doesn't matter, it's a violation."
By comparison, someone here brought up that it might be transformative fair use to write a play heavily based on Blood Meridian, but you still need to buy a copy of the book. It would still be infringement to pirate the e-book for your writing process, even if the end result was legal.