[boolemancer]

> Personally, I think these companies are just stealing copyrighted works, and should be sued for that. It's against the law, it's pretty simple.

Is it copyright infringement to count how many times each letter appears in a book?

I don't know that it is, and if it's not, then there is at least some line you can draw where mechanically reading and learning from a copyrighted work is not copyright infringement.

The question of whether training a transformer model is on the legal side of that line remains to be seen, but I don't think it's as clear cut as you make it out to be.