All of this conversation aside, anyone who is saying "fair use" concedes that their use more or less would be explicitly unauthorized, but because it advances "some" "goals" in this country, it should be allowed anyway. It is a necessarily adversarial stance but it belies that the author the Pile sincerely wants to advance human progress in an idiosyncratic way. I think this is what pisses off the commenters here, they want to take sides, but like, who cares.

> I don’t understand how this can be true if set 2 contains a complete copyrighted work (say, a book) that the copyright owner hasn’t approved for such distribution.

Everything you're saying could be true, but also meaningless.

Meaningless in what sense? In my personal opinion, here are some meaningful things:

- Economic meaning: Is the Pile making anyone suffer, in an intellectually honest sense? No. Is the way it is being used making anyone suffer? No. Would anyone use the Pile if they had to pay for it? No. Would some tiny amount of money paid for it matter? No, not to anyone. The Pile is but one of many things that are going on in this pareto-inefficient world that we gain little economically by fucking with.

- Meaning in the sense of human progress. Is the Pile sincerely, substantively helping advance creative and scientific progress? Yes. Can the progress it promotes coexist peacefully, in this current status quo, with selling books on Amazon, which can also advance progress? Yes. Is there any evidence that this non-economic progress, such as sharing important stories or points of view meaningfully through text content, is harmed by the Pile? No.

The following ways of looking at this issue are meaningless:

- Psychological meaning is meaningless. Feelings that are more strongly felt by more favored parties, like beloved authors versus impetuous programmers, are not more valid. Stakeholders like authors merely exercising their collective bargaining power over something that doesn't actually make them worse off is meaningless too. Social media drama also doesn't matter.

These are just opinions. I don't go out there and say I'm a lawyer, and I'm not running for Congress, and neither are you. It's crazy to me, because when you look critically at what dog you personally have in this race, like of course you want the status quo where The Pile exists, and you and the only agitators in all of this - authors' guild authors - gain nothing from nearly every dead-on-arrival framework like "Compensation, Credit and Consent" or whatever, BESIDES meaningless psychological satisfaction of winning social media arguments and flexing the favorability of authors over programmers. Imagine if we ran the whole country this way! It's radioactive.

So this isn't a non-sequiter. Supporting the status quo, in this particular case, is the succinct way of saying everything here: that you can be right in ways that don't at all matter, which is okay, but you should have the insight or maybe if you are a programmer or an author or actually you are running for Congress, you have the duty to understand this stuff.