A recent ruling has shaken what we thought we knew about copyright. Judge William Alsup ruled in favor of Anthropic’s use of purchased books to train its AI. According to the judge, this action was fair use.
While this was turning heads, he went ahead to compare large language models (LLM) like Claude to school children who are learning to write. Yes, you read that correctly.
But the problem with this logic is that AI training is industrial–scale data ingestion and not a simple third-grade essay contest. The judge’s analogy is flawed, but that’s the basis for his ruling and that’s pretty concerning.
A Child Can’t Read a Million Books Overnight, AI Can
Alsup’s logic is something like this: since it is legal to teach a student to write using books, it’s also legal to do so for a machine. On the surface, this might sound logical until you realize that Claude is no student. Large language models don’t grow up, and they don’t forget. Therefore, you cannot categorize such learning in any human sense.
Besides, Anthropic digitized these books and fed them into its model at a scale no classroom could imagine. The judge said it’s spectacularly transformative, but there’s nothing transformative as far as the language model is concerned. It only extracted information and stored it; it didn’t change it in any way.
Let’s even talk about the fact that a student cannot read several books in one night and then quote it word-for-word. Yet, Alsup wants us to believe that there’s nothing wrong with feeding an AI a million books overnight and having it reproduce verbatim.
The Classroom Analogy Breaks Copyright
Alsup’s analogy collapses under proper legal scrutiny. The thing is, fair use doesn’t apply simply because something resembles education. Over the years, courts have required that transformative use change the character or purpose of the original work.
Yet, we all know that Claude doesn’t transform Jane Austen into parody or literary criticism. Instead, it digests her, stores her, and uses her exact style to generate marketable outputs. That is not fair use in any way but functional replication.
It’s the same way a teacher can’t photocopy and distribute an entire Shakespeare play for profit, but can quote it in class. The line is clear, but Alsup has blurred it with this questionable ruling.
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