> Fair use is an admission of copyright violation. If this is your starting point, you should probably look for new lawyers. It's an admission to copying when

> Fair use is an admission of copyright violation. If this is your starting point, you should probably look for new lawyers. It's an admission to copying when there's a prima facie case of copyright infringement, but wouldn't generally be considered actual infringement if the fair use defense is successful. It's perfectly fine to rely on fair use - we'll have to wait and see how it applies to machine learning, but it's not some obscure implausible theory. > In any case, exact reproduction of the full novels as part of a dataset is of course not covered by fair use It definitely can be. Consider in Authors Guild v. Google, where Google copied millions of in-copyright books, stored them internally in full, and made them accessible as snippets: "verbatim intermediate copying has consistently been upheld as fair use if the copy is ‘not reveal[ed] . . . to the public.’"