This article reports that Anthropic has agreed to pay out a $1.5 billion settlement for copyright violations while training their Claude AI tool on books found on the Internet. That works out to be about $3000 per book.
The whole idea of books (at least nonfiction books) is that readers are supposed to learn from them. But now if actual learning from them takes place it's a $3000 charge!
It used to be that to violate a copyright required copying, not merely training. What's more, in the USA the sole justification for government-enforced monopolies on intellectual property is Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the U.S. Constitution, which authorizes copyrights and patents only to "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts," and only "for limited Times," and only "to Authors and Inventors." By extending copyright duration to the "author's life plus 70 years," Congress flouted those restrictions, and this precedent further tramples them, by clearly impeding the progress of science and useful arts.