> It is a strange copyright protection indeed that explicitly or implicitly prohibits certain types of machine readings, while allowing many others. As far as

> It is a strange copyright protection indeed that explicitly or implicitly prohibits certain types of machine readings, while allowing many others. As far as I know, licenses can discriminate on whatever constraint they want to[1]. A license that is basically "This work is for $FOO only. If you want a $BAR license please contact us." is perfectly legal right now! There is no restriction in law that $FOO cannot be "human consumption" and $BAR cannot be ""machine consumption". If the AI companies are not arguing the "fair use" argument, then they are arguing for AI companies having a special exemption for themselves carved out in law whereby a copyright holder is forced to license their works to the AI companies specifically. IOW, their only recourse is to argue "fair use", because any other argument boils down to "please make a special exemption for us in copyright law, defying hundreds of years of precedent", which is a particularly hard sell. [1]Excluding discriminating against protected classes.