There are at least 3 distinct things in your post. 1. Authors' works were (are?) illegally distributed in 'Books3': This seems to clearly be a copyright infrin

There are at least 3 distinct things in your post. 1. Authors' works were (are?) illegally distributed in 'Books3': This seems to clearly be a copyright infringement. That being said, I'd be shocked if someone could prove this copyright infringement made an appreciable impact on an author's income. Something tangible, not a hand-wavey "but they would have bought my book". I know that I don't go out downloading books from places like ThePile if I want to read something. I'd wager most people don't. 2. Facebook (et al.) acquired illegal collections of books vs legally acquiring the books: If that is true (seems likely) then they should suffer punishment for the acquisition. That being said, it's the same cudgel that'd be used to sue individuals into oblivion, so the end outcomes might be less constructive for the rest of humanity. I do feel like corporations involved in mass copyright infringement should be held accountable though. 3. Facebook (et al.) trained foundational models on collections of books they acquired (disconnect #2 from #3 here): I'd argue strongly that the foundational model training is not a copyright violation. It's not storing copyrighted works and distributing them. It is using them to model language patterns and token frequencies that could be used to create an approximation of a copyrighted work if the training was poor and you prompt it properly. There are plenty of experts in this matter that could discuss this in depth, but the essence of the fight boils down to if you believe that the copyrighted works are being distributed via these trained models or not. Now, if people want to change copyright law such that there are specific laws around how ML models are trained on copyrighted works, then perhaps this problem gets resolved in one direction or the other. Until then, all parties are just talking past each other and hoping the courts eventually agree with their arguments.