Establishing an affirmative defense that it's transformative fair use would hopefully be an uphill battle, given that it's commercial, using the whole work, and has a detrimental effect on the market for the work.
Reproducing a movie still well enough that I honestly wouldn't know which one is the original is transformative?
If I download all content from a website that has a use policy stating that all content is owned by that website and can't be resold. Then allow my users to query this downloaded data and receive a detailed summary of all related content, and sell that product. Perhaps this is a violation of the use policy.
All of this hasn't been properly tested in the courts yet.. large payments have already been made to Reddit to avoid this, likely because Reddit has the means to fight this in court.. my little blog though, fair game because I can't afford to engage.
You’re talking about overt infringement, the GP was talking about covert infringement. It’s difficult to see how something could be covert yet not transformative.
"even" is odd there, of course Disney is accusing them of violating copyright, that's what Disney does.
> AI is getting better at data laundering and hiding evidence of infringement, but ultimately it's collecting and regurgitating copyrighted content.
That's not the standard for copyright infringement; AI is a transformative use.
Similarly, if you read a book and learn English or facts about the world by doing that, the author of the book doesn't own what you just learned.