I am an author who derives his principal income from my published works. Millions of people have illegally downloaded my work, and I would love it if they had m

I am an author who derives his principal income from my published works. Millions of people have illegally downloaded my work, and I would love it if they had maybe sent me a dollar or two if they read it, but so far the bitcoin address published in the book for piracy donations has yet to receive even a single sat. I see this as just a fact of life for publishing in the digital age, so I try to make my work more valuable to have in paper form that in digital form…. To make it an indispensable tool that merits its own physicality based on its utility. I cannot imagine claiming that I have a right to the -ideas- or concepts in my work , though. That is what patents are for, and a patent also doesn’t give me the right to exclusive use of my ideas, just limited exclusivity of implementation. The relatively free sharing of ideas is a fundamental pillar of society, and without the free sharing of ideas, modern civilization would be impossible. Copyright doesn’t grant you exclusivity to the ideas in your work. It doesn’t grant immunity to having a few sentences repeated even verbatim. Fan fiction is fair use, as are most derivative works. The only legitimate use of intellectual work is the extraction of knowledge from it, basically the equivalent of reading or teaching it. Training is teaching. It could have been done (much more slowly) by going to the library and using the books in the library to train from. It is not the redistribution of these works. It is the use of these works. If a book cannot be used to transfer knowledge or ideas, then is it legal to read it at all? There may have been flaws in the process of “reading” this work that involved technical violations of copyright law. But the use of information that is published and not covered by an NDA is part and parcel of the fundamental benefits of living in a society as we understand it. The use interpretation, application,and processing of knowledge is what we are really discussing here. If we say that copyright prevents this, then we need to abolish libraries, schools, newspapers, the internet, any mechanism by which copyrighted material may be exposed to persons who might wish to use, interpret, or apply that information. What tools they use to do this is irrelevant. For those that would say that training creates a copy, I defy you to have any llm reproduce a significant body of copyrighted work. You’ll have about as much luck as asking someone to do the same from memory. And if they can, what does that mean? Is the savant reader guilty of copyright infringement if they write down their recollection? Perhaps. Or is it the actor that causes them to do so? Or is it the act of distributing that perfect memory that then is the violation of copyright ? (I’d argue this is the line in the sand).