Archive.org was distributing the books themselves to users. Anthropic argued (and the authors suing them weren’t able to show otherwise) that their software prevents users from actually retrieving books out of the LLM, and that it only will produce snippets of text from copyrighted works. And producing snippets in the context of something else is fair use, like commentary or criticism.
The ruling explicitly says that scanning books and keeping/using those digital copies is legal.
The piracy found to be illegal was downloading unauthorized copies of books from the internet for free.
I wonder if the archive.org cases had any bearing on the decision.
Archive.org was distributing the books themselves to users. Anthropic argued (and the authors suing them weren’t able to show otherwise) that their software prevents users from actually retrieving books out of the LLM, and that it only will produce snippets of text from copyrighted works. And producing snippets in the context of something else is fair use, like commentary or criticism.