> Authors? Not so much. Losing your book to AI for a one time $3000 settlement feels like a bad deal to me.

AFAIK it's even worse as this settlement is only about downloading pirated copies of the books. IIRC the training itself was deemed fair use.

Well things are worse in the sense that a different ruling feels really bad for them.

But it means that this case is getting them thousands of dollars instead of one or two purchases, which is a pretty good outcome.

> Losing your book to AI for a one time $3000 settlement feels like a bad deal to me.

I'm wondering how lost would the book be? What would be the difference in sales.

It isn't about sales in the short term. Same with code. Your project might even be OSS (so not expecting profit). Its about a system that exploits that for one party's profit, while putting the other out of business. They reduced the writer's ability to ever be employed again, or to make royalties at the same level as before (not necessarily reduced the sales of existing titles, though that may occur as well).

Same with code, AI hoovering all the code doesn't mean people won't use libCurl, but it does mean jobs are disappearing and people may not be around to write the next libCurl.

How does the saying go again? “Everyone’s a libertarian until they get punched in the face.”