The Law Can't Keep Up
In The Uncomfortable Parts I worked through the things about AI-assisted development that I benefit from and haven't resolved, and the training-data question was the one I left most openly unfinished. I said the lawsuits were unresolved and that "unresolved" was doing a lot of heavy lifting, because what it actually meant was "no, and we're hoping the courts sort it out."
I've since spent more time looking at whether the courts actually can sort it out, and I don't think they can, at least not on any timescale that matters. The problem isn't that the institutions are getting it wrong, it's that they're built to move at a speed the technology left behind years ago. That mismatch is the reason almost every uncomfortable part stays uncomfortable, so it's worth talking about in its own article.
The clearest example is the one closest to me. Anthropic, whose API my entire development workflow runs through, agreed last year to settle the Bartz class action for $1.5 billion, the largest copyright settlement in US history, covering roughly 500,000 books pulled from shadow libraries [1]. The fairness hearing was held on the 14th of May this year. As I write this, almost a month later, there's still no final approval order. The judge took it under submission and ordered more briefing on a handful of late opt-outs [1]. A billion-and-a-half-dollar agreement that both sides want approved is still not done.