Also I expect there should be more surveillance around powerful people like Larry Ellison, right?

The more powerful, the more important is to ensure good behavior, and the more public / peer-reviewed the AI model and its logs should be to avoid tampering/laundering.

You still call the period before when the sun is directly overhead “morning” and the period after “afternoon” and similarly with “evening”, “night”, “dawn”, “noon”, “midnight” etc.

Note that the Sun position is not consistent throught the year and varies widely based on your latitude.

In Iceland (and also Alaska) you can have the Sun for a full 24 hours in the sky (they call it “midnight sun”) during Summer solstice (with extremelly short nights the whole summer) and the opposite happens in Winter, with long periods of night time.

I think it still makes the most sense to decide that the days of the week (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, etc) last from whatever time “midnight” is locally to the following midnight, again probably rounding to the nearest whole hour.

Just the days of the week? you mean that 2024-06-30 23:59 and 2024-07-01 00:01 can both be the same weekday and at the same time be different days? Would the definition of “day” be different based on whether you are talking about “day of the week” vs “universal day”?

In that counter argument they are essentially admitting that 99% of their content was distributed without the copyright holder’s consent.

In the CDL lawsuit, they have admitted that of the millions of books we have digitized, they themselves have only made about 33,000 available to libraries; only about 1% of what we have done, and only under restrictive and expensive license agreements. This is, they claim, the essence of their copyright rights: the ability to restrict access to information as they see fit, to further their theoretical economic interests, without regard to libraries traditional functions and the greater public good.

Was it fair use in the past to redistribute reprints/format-conversions of works without the copyright holders consent?

I agree that copyright law sucks… but that’s why it needs to change so it actually serves “the greater public good”. The judiciary system is not the right place to advocate for that (they don’t make the law, just interpret it), so I don’t really think there’s much hope in them winning this. Sadly.