Nine days before this tweet, a federal court finalized the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history. $1.5 billion, paid by an AI company, over almost exactly the scenario described here. The case was Bartz v. Anthropic. In 2024, three authors sued after learning the company had downloaded more than 7 million pirated books to build a training library for its Claude chatbot. In June 2025 the judge split the ruling. Training an AI model on books it had legally bought and scanned counted as fair use, meaning it reused copyrighted material in a new, transformed way. But downloading and keeping millions of pirated copies did not count as fair use. That difference, bought versus stolen, is why the company owed anyone money. The settlement works out to roughly $3,000 per book across about 500,000 titles. That's four times the $750 courts usually award per infringed work. A trial was still set for December 2025, where a jury could have pushed the number as high as $150,000 per book for willful infringement. The company settled instead. DVD ripping runs into a different law. It's illegal for a reason that has nothing to do with whether copying a movie you paid for is fair. A DVD is protected by encryption, and a 2001 appeals court ruling said breaking that encryption is its own separate violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Fair use can't excuse that, even when the underlying copy would otherwise be legal. That law is two decades older than the AI industry, and it applies the same way no matter who's doing the ripping. Enforcement against individuals has also been close to nonexistent, according to legal analysts, even though the law technically makes almost every home DVD rip a violation. The real line between legal and illegal, for a company or a person, is whether the source material was bought or stolen. Courts just charged one AI company $1.5 billion for landing on the wrong side of it.