This violates the RICO statute; the entire organization was aware of and relied on the widespread and organized violation of copyright laws as the basis of their entire business. It is a criminal organization, should be seized, and everyone in the chain of command that was aware of or executed on this plan should be tried criminally.

I do not think training an AI model is Fair Use, because LLM "training" is being used as a metaphor for building a matrix with a computer. Only people and animals train and learn; computers run statistical problems over input, which in this case was illegal input acquired by humans.

But it does not matter whether training LLMs is Fair Use, "Fair Use" is a strange and arbitrary legal term that can be expanded to include AI if we wish. This was organized crime whether or not LLM training on copyrighted materials is fair use. It was organized crime whether or not they planned to use them for AI at all.

AI is irrelevant. They could have trained it on GPL'd or MIT code (as long as they then distributed according to the terms of the licenses), and works in the public domain. They could have gotten what they were doing explicitly declared to be fair use by the Library of Congress, and then purchased the materials, like they are belatedly doing now. It wasn't necessary to violate copyright law to prove the technology. They could have proved the technology, then asked for copyright law to be clarified, and licensed huge volumes of works from the very few publishers we have left. Becoming a criminal organization was an explicit choice they made, and they discussed its illegality, and even the risk that it would be discussed on HN, which might inspire prosecution.

The reason they are not being prosecuted is because the rich are beyond the law; prosecutors will not prosecute them. The RICO statute is clear, and explicitly mentions copyright violation.

We can sentence the executives harshly, but go easy on the lower level people, because they are intelligent and valuable to advance the technology. The executives aren't necessary for anything. They're currently running finance scams that are extremely dangerous for the economy. They belong in prison to protect the public.

This is an option that people (real people, with names) have, and are not taking. When they say that they care about law and order, and are worried about the behavior of these companies, they are lying. Trump could literally nationalize them for what they've done. They're vulnerable to any state's attorney who has any author in their state whose book was downloaded. Libgen/Annas-archive would have been the most important honeypot in history.