here’s the analogy i can’t unsee: we already have machines that can memorize books — humans.
some savants can read a novel once and keep it verbatim for decades.
nobody calls that infringement; law and ethics don’t police what happens in your head.
the line is when you externalize it: when you write it back out and hand it around as a substitute copy.
training an ai is the reading step — absorption, compression, interiorizing.
the real harm is the dump: when a prompt turns the system into a photocopier for protected paragraphs.
so aim the fight where it belongs: test and punish verbatim reproduction, build guardrails against it. keep the right to learn, without quietly granting the right to reprint.