A court just ruled on Anthropic and said an LLM response wasn't a form of counterfeiting (ie, essentially selling pirate books on the black market). Although tbf that is the most radical interpretation still being put forward by the lawyers of publishers like NYTimes, despite the obvious flaws.

What someone at Anthropic did was download libgen once, then Anthropic figured "wait a minute, isn't that illegal?" , so instead they went and bought 7 million books for real and cut them up to scan them.

Turns out this doesn't quite mitigate downloading them first. (Though frankly, I'm very much against people having to buy 7 million books when someone has already scanned them)

No, it isn't.