Comment by bena
7 days ago
That's a bit of a wild interpretation of copyright law.
I mean, Anthropic isn't going to fight it because it lets them do the thing they want to do, so I can see how this never gets beyond the court that allows them to do the thing they want to do.
But would this argument would have flown in the past?
It wasn't even attempted in Sony v Universal. Or any copyright suit up until this point. That doesn't smell funny to you?
Sure, it's a bit wild, and no, the same outcome may not have been reached if the case came up earlier. And if it makes it to the Supreme Court, who knows what they will turn it into.
The flip side is that Alsup (the judge who wrote the opinion) is probably the smartest district court judge we have when it comes to technology, and one of the people I'd trust most to come up good decision.
He's a treasure, and my instinct is that he got it right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Alsup