They wanted access to a faster pipe to slurp 500 terabytes, and that access comes at a cost. It wasn’t about permission.

And yeah they should be sued into the next century for copyright infringement. $4Trillion company illegally downloading the entire corpus of published literature for reuse is clearly infringement, its an absurdity to say that it’s fair use just to look for statistical correlations when training LLMs that will be used to render human authors worthless. One or two books is fair use. Every single book published is not.

It wasn't about permission, it was about high-speed access. They needed Anna's Archive to facilitate that for them, scraping was too slow. It's incredible that they were allowed to continue even after Anna's Archive themselves explicitly pointed out that the material was acquired illegally.

It's not permission, it's a service they offer:

https://annas-archive.li/llm