Earlier quoted context omitted.
Something missed in arguments such as these is that in measuring fair use there's a consideration of impact on the potential market for a rightsholder's present and future works. In other words, can it be proven that what you are doing is meaningfully depriving the author of future income. Now, in theory, you learning from an author's works and competing with them in the same market could meaningfully deprive them of…
> a consideration of impact on the potential market for a rightsholder's present and future works This is one of those mental gymnastics exercises that makes copyright law so obtuse and effectively unenforceable. As an alternative, imagine a scriptwriter buys a textbook on orbital mechanics, while writing Gravity (2013). A large number of people watch the finished film, and learn something about orbital mechanics, th…
I think, in your example, the obvious answer is no, they're not entitled to any profits of Gravity. How could you possibly prove Gravity has anything to do with someone reading, or not reading, a textbook? You can't.
However, AI participates in the exact same markets it trains from. That's obviously very different. It is INTENDED to DIRECTLY replace the things it trains on.
Meaning, not only does an LLM output directly replace the textbook it was trained on, but that behavior is the sole commercial goal of the company. That's why they're doing it, and that's the only reason they're doing it.