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Courts have rejected the "training is piracy" interpretation.

I agree with the courts. I don't think learning from something is piracy in anyway.

Obviously though this is a very different issue to what the OP was claiming. In that case there is no legal argument at all that they could train on it and the argument is there about moral rights.

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Buying and copying one training manual and distributing it to 1000s of human workers is considered illegal, but somehow scanning one book and sending it to 1000s of distributed training instances is not?

Also, you learning something is different than a model learning it, because a model is not a person. You can learn from a book and sell the skills you gained from it, but you can only be in one place at a time. The model can serve that knowledge to every person on the planet simultaneously. We obviously need new laws since this is a fundamentally different situation.

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As you point out, a model is not a person, so your second argument invalidates your first sentence. We can't assume that they're the same thing; that's for the courts to decide. It ultimately hinges on whether or not the courts consider a given use of copyrighted material as "transformative" or otherwise constituting fair use under copyright law.
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The model seems to be a person when it's advantageous and not a person when it isn't...
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There's a lot of anthropomorphizing on all sides of the debate. Personally, I think we should just call it a piece of software and leave it at that.
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I was making two separate points:

A model is not a person -> we need to write new laws. This is not a job for the courts but for us as a society.

The rest of my argument -> information that helps the courts decide, which generally will look at precedent with humans as that is the closest proxy. When you extrapolate from the law as it pertains to humans, the duplication of books for distributed training seems illegal.

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Training a model is not "learning something". Only people learn things. Whether training is a fair use is debatable, but it has nothing to do with the justification that people are allowed to learn from books.
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