The judge in that case ruled the training wasn’t fair use for pirated books, which left them on the hook for potentially all revenue (likely a court determined percentage) that the model generated for them in addition to statutory damages. That is well north of 1.5 billion.

The model doesn’t stream out anyone’s content though. The article mentions that the plaintiffs have provided no examples of a prompt that creates anything substantial.

Streaming a lossy compression would generally be infringement, but there is definitely a point where it becomes not infringement if it’s lossy enough.

What a model generally stores, is factual information that isn’t copyright in the first place. It’s storing word counts, sentence lengths, sentiment analysis, and so on.

Arguing that training models isn’t fair use us going to be a massive uphill battle, it’s basically reading the book but with a computer. It’s not actually a big deal to people, unless you hold the copyright to a ton of works and want to get a percentage of all the AI income these companies have made.

Torrenting the books is likely absolutely copyright infringement, but that has relatively low payout compared to the money these companies are getting for their models. The training being fair use means that rights holders can’t try to take any money from the model’s use. The statutory limits for infringement even at per work levels aren’t significant compared to the legal cost of proving it happened.