Technology

Many of the AI companies have been downloading content through means other than scraping, such as bittorrent, to access and compile copyrighted data that is not publicly scrape-able. That includes Meta, OpenAI, and Google.

Anthropic is the only company to have admitted publicly to doing this. They were sued and settled out of court. Google and OpenAI have had no such accusations as far as I'm aware. Furthermore, Google had the gigantic book scanning project where it was determined in court that the act of scanning as many fucking books as you want is perfectly legal (fair use). Read all about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.

In late 2013, after the class action status was challenged, the District Court granted summary judgment in favor of Google, dismissing the lawsuit and affirming the Google Books project met all legal requirements for fair use. The Second Circuit Court of Appeal upheld the District Court's summary judgment in October 2015, ruling Google's "project provides a public service without violating intellectual property law." The U.S. Supreme Court subsequently denied a petition to hear the case.

You say:

That is also false. Just because you don’t understand the legal distinction between scraping content to summarize in order to direct people to a site (there was already a lawsuit against Google that established this, as well as its boundaries), versus scraping content to generate a replacement that obviates the original content, doesn’t mean the law doesn’t understand it.

There is no such legal distinction. Scraping content is legal no matter WTF you plan to do with it. This has been settled in court many, many times. Here's some court cases for you to learn the actual legality of scraping and storing of said scraped data:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn (recent!)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Buren_v._United_States — This one is really relevant because it reaffirmed the concept of, "if you put it on the Internet, anyone can download it; that's fair use... Regardless of intent"... just because you put up some acceptable use policy that says, "you may not scrape this"—or use it to train AI—is irrelevant. You have to read the full ruling to get all those details though (sorry).
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_v._Arriba_Soft_Corp. and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_10,_Inc._v._Amazon.com,_Inc. ­— These are the big court cases that determined that what search engines do "is transformative" and therefore, fair use. The courts ruled that summarizing (thumbnails or generating text) what you scrape is fair use. By extension, one can assume that what an AI does with the scraped data is the same thing. Remember: At the heart of every AI model is a random number generator. They're not "plagiarism machines" as many would like to believe. They're random word prediction engines.
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_v._Google,_Inc. — This is the court case that ruled—very specifically!—that caching the entire copyrighted works in your database is perfectly legal.

To summarize all this: You are 100% wrong. I have cited my sources. I was there ("3000 years ago...") when all this went down. Pepperidge Farm remembers.

You say:

And none of this matters, because AI companies aren’t just reading content, they’re taking it and using it for commercial purposes.

This is a common misconception of copyright law: Remember Napster? They were sued and argued in court that because users don't profit from sharing songs with their friends, it is legal. The court rejected this argument: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A%26M_Records,_Inc._v._Napster,_Inc. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitol_Records,_Inc._v._Thomas-Rasset and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_%26_Row_v._Nation_Enterprises and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Geophysical_Union_v._Texaco,_Inc. where the courts all ruled the same way.

You say:

Perhaps you are unaware, but (at least in the US) while it is legal for you to view a video on YouTube, if you download it for offline use that would constitute copyright infringement if the owner objects. The video being public does not grant anyone and everyone the right to use it however they wish. Ditto for something like making an mp3 of a song on Spotify using Audacity.

Downloading a Youtube video for offline use is legal... Depending on the purpose. This is one of those very, very nuanced areas of copyright law where fair use intersects with the DMCA and also intersects with the CFAA. The DMCA states, "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title." Since Youtube videos have some technical measures to prevent copying (depending on the resolution and platform!), it is illegal to circumvent them. However, The Librarian of Congress can grant exceptions to this rule and has done so for many situations. For example, archiving (https://www.arl.org/news/librarian-of-congress-expands-dmca-exemption-for-text-and-data-mining/) which is just plain wacky, IMHO.

Regardless, if Youtube didn't put an anti-circumvention mechanism into their videos it would be perfectly legal to download the videos. Just like it's legal to record TV shows with a VCR. This was ruled in Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios (already cited). There's no reason why it wouldn't still apply to Youtube videos. The fact that no one has been sued for doing this since then (that I could find) seems to indicate that this is a very settled thing.

You say:

no one is arguing that it is theft, they are arguing that it is copyright infringement, which is what all of us are also subject to under the DMCA. So we’re actually arguing that AI companies should be held to the same standard that we are.

No. Fuck no. A shittton of people are saying it's "theft". Have you been on the Internet recently? LOL! I see it every damned day and I'm sick of it. I repeat myself that, "it's not theft, it's copyright infringement" and I get downvoted for "being pedantic". Like it's not a very fucking important distinction!

...but also: What an AI model does isn't copyright infringement (usually). You ask it to generate an image or some text and it just does what you ask it to do. The fact that it's possible for it to infringe copyright shouldn't matter because it's just a tool like a Xerox machine/copier. It has already been ruled fair use for an AI company to train their models with copyrighted works (great summary of that here: https://www.debevoise.com/insights/publications/2025/06/anthropic-and-meta-decisions-on-fair-use ). Despite these TWO court rulings, people are still saying that training AI models is both "theft" and somehow "illegal". We're already past that.

AI models are terrible copyright violators! Everything they generate—at best—can only ever be, "kinda sorta like" a copyrighted work. You can get closer and closer if you get clever with prompts and tell the model to generate say, 10000 images of the same thing. Then you can look at your prayers to the RNG gods and say, "Aha! Look! This image looks very very similar to Indiana Jones!"

You say:

Also, note that AI companies have argued in court (in the case brought by Steven King et al) that their use of copyrighted material shouldn’t fall under DMCA at all (i.e. arguing that it’s not about Fair Use), because their argument is that AI training is not the ‘intended use’ of the source material, so this is not eating into that commercial use. That argument leaves copyright infringement liability intact for the rest of us, while solely exempting them from liability. No thanks.

Luckily, them arguing they’re apart and separate from Fair Use also means that this can be rejected without affecting Fair Use! Double-win!

Where TF did you see this? I did some searching and I cannot see anything suggesting that the AI companies have rejected any kind of DMCA protection.