Yes, anthropic and openai have really been brought to their knees and ipos cancelled because of the legal consequences of obtaining their training data.
This would have been a problem but it turns out that Anthropic is actually valued multiple orders of magnitude more than a copy of all the books in the world. So they survived the significant legal consequences.
In a just world, the punishment can be more than just the sum of the direct damages, otherwise there's no incentive to stop reoffending.
Anthropic (and friends) proved they're willing to do obviously illegal things, and it didn't end them. Why do we think they stopped after doing it once?
> In this world too, the punishment was, ballpark, 100x direct damages.
Which ballpark are you playing in to come to a number like that? I have friends whom are authors, and they've certainly not seen a penny from Anthropic. I somehow doubt they're the only ones out there that haven't been compensated for having their work blatantly stolen. In a just world we'd be ensuring Anthropic was destroyed as a result of their actions, since their entire existence hinged on en-masse piracy.
In a just world, copyright should be abolished with extreme prejudice should it's continued existence prevent humanity from developing aligned artificial super intelligence.
I disagree on so many levels that it would be impossible to have a reasonable debate. To give only my most charitable counterpoint:
(If, big if*) successful AGI will be such an accelerant to human thought, it should be able to reproduce every human work, every scientific theory, etc. without any training data, in a decade.
All we have ever done as humans is look at the world and ourselves, and then create new data out of what we've seen[0]. Now imagine how much parallel compute we could throw at doing the same thing.
Anthropic paid (or is paying, not sure the schedule for class members receiving payouts) 3000 per work they were found to have infringed - 30 is a fair approximation of the cost to buy a book.