No it only applies to books because books have an entirely different legal system than everything else.

SCOTUS case: White-Smith Music Publishing Co. v. Apollo Co. (1908) created a new issue for the Government about copying people’s printed works.

Copyright Act of 1909 is passed. New framework is established, books get an entirely different legal system from everything else. Publishers lobbied to prevent it’s passage and fought it especially hard in the Great Depression because libraries were becoming very popular during that time.

But printed books have a whole different thing that applies to them that doesn’t apply to anything else. So you can’t use “physical medium” because books are a special case and have their own special US law.

For books, transformative, has to deal with the intent.

• Book - I want to read them.
• Anthropic - I want to convert it to weights for use in massive matrix multiplication operations.

Since the intent is different, the book first sale doctrine applies here to grant transformative. Which is but just one pillar in their defense.

Same goes for what Google did like a decade ago.

• Book - I want to read them.
• Google - I want to convert it to a searchable database of terms that can refer you to the correct ISBN.

And transformative applies too to things like DVDs, it’s just under a different framework known as the DMCA.

• DVD - I want to watch the movie.
• MP4 - I want to watch the movie.

That’s not transformative.

• DVD - I want to watch the movie.
• MP4 - I want to take clips to make memes.

That is transformative. And again, transformative is but one thing out of the whole “fair use” thing.

This is the thing. Those news articles are oversimplifying a massive amount of legal technicalities. I’m not saying what Anthropic is doing is correct or not. What I am saying is that the conclusion that people are getting from these stories is like the last 10% of a massively technical legal battle. And running with that small amount can lead to conclusions that aren’t true.

And I know someone is going to bring it up. No you aren’t LEGALLY allows to rip a copy of a DVD for your personal use. Violates the DMCA. BUT in order to sue you, a publisher has to know ahead of time before discovery, that you broke their encryption scheme, which if you only keep it personally, is impossible for them to ever enforce. So we have a law that is written in a way, that if you never put it online, it’s impossible to enforce the law. As a summary of how all that works.

It won’t matter the AI or not at this point. This has baked and changed production so much that even if AI fell out tomorrow, it’d take years to retool and undo the amount of tooling chip makers have done to commit HBM DRAM.

Like a lot of the tooling that was done was done on the back of speculation. Now that it’s done, undoing it would cost a fortune and that price is going to be amortized by the customer. And since we’ve baked this new higher price for so long, it’s going to take forever to cool it back off.

AI or not, these prices are the new normal price. Things like ARM desktops, those are going to be the average consumer computer. Things with discrete GPUs and RAM that is user serviceable, that’s becoming niche. There’s already been way too much investment in that direction to go back at this point. I mean you even look at DDR6 desktops, CAMM2 is the compromise normal there too. You don’t buy 4x8GB, you buy a 32GB block, that’s it. You have the one slot, that’s it.

The AI thing, it’s just pushed a lot of other things past the point of return. While there might be some reduction after the fall of AI, even if chip makers swapped back to desktop product as fast as they can, they’ve invested so deeply into AI, that fast as they can is years before consumers will ever see relief, if ever.

At this point, I see PCs adopting the Apple way of putting it all in a single chip approach. Just because, that’s where a lot of investment has already gone and if RAM tanks, they’ll want to hold onto whatever investments they’ve already made rather try and blaze a new path.