They’re taking that textbook (that wasn’t paid for) and feeding it into their commercial product.

Nobody has provided any evidence that this is the case. Until this is proven it should not be assumed. Bandwagoning (and repeating this over and over again without any evidence or proof) against the ML people without evidence is not fair. The whole point of the Justice system is innocent until proven guilty.

The end product is derived from the author’s work.

Derivative works are 100% protected under copyright law. https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/what-are-derivative-works-under-copyright-law

This is the same premise that allows "fair use" that we all got up and arms about on youtube. Claiming that this doesn't exist now in this case means that all that stuff we fought for on Youtube needs to be rolled back.

To put it a different way, would they still be able to produce ChatGPT if one of the developers simply read that same textbook and then inputted what they learned into the model? My guess is no.

Why not? Why can't someone grab a book, scan it... chuck it into an OCR and get the same content? There are plenty of ways that snippets of raw content could make it into these repositories WITHOUT asserting legal problems.

It’d be the same if I went and bought CDs, ripped my favorite tracks, and then put them into a compilation album that I then sold for money.

No... You could have for all intents and purposes have recorded all your songs from the radio onto a cassette... That would be 100% legal for personal consumption... which would be what the ML authors are doing. ChatGPT and others could have sources information from published sources that are completely legit. No "Author" has provided any evidence otherwise yet to believe that ChatGPT and others have actually broken a law yet. For all we know the authors of these tools have library cards, and fed in screenshots of the digital scans of the book or hand scanned the book. Or didn't even use the book at all and contextually grabbed a bunch of content from the internet at large.

Since the ML bots are all making derivative works, rather than spitting out original content... they'd be covered by copyright as a derivative work.

This only becomes an actual problem if you can prove that these tools have done BOTH

1. obtain content in an illegal fashion
2. provide the copyrighted content freely without fair-use or other protections.