This decision reinforces the idea that copying for non-commercial, transformative purposes—like making a book searchable, training an AI, or preserving web pages—can be lawful under fair use. That legal protection is essential to modern librarianship.

I'm happy that this works out in libraries' favor, but I can't see how Anthropic managed to slip through "copying for non-commercial, transformative purposes". Are they a non-profit and I just didn't know?

When copying is legal for profit, it's safe to assume that it's also legal without profit.

That's old logic that might not be as certain in the new era.

What makes profit, can share it with those making laws.

And one anti-monopoly thing that was at some point common was that it's illegal to provide a service below market cost to capture markets. Probably if that were applied to the Internet and free services like Facebook and Reddit and Google, many things would go differently.

But at the same time even today payments over the Internet are problematic. If you could pay for storage and computation the same way you pay for landline, without extra bother, maybe we'd have something better.

Actually, fair point. While the Anthropic judge case is awful for artists and such, it is actually a great thing for libraries and especially the internet archive, which has faced heavy pressure in the last years.
It's really ironic that the public good library that has been facing heavy pressure from giant corporations is now… being saved by other giant cooperations which are now deemed more important

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Funny, how things change as soon as the corporate overlords can make money from it.