Myrtle Beach, SC Correspondent — If you can scrape a living writer’s shelf to build a machine that competes with the shelf, that isn’t a book report.

Fair use was built for quotation, parody, teaching, a slice. Training a commercial model on a corpus so it can emit the style is a different industrial act, and stretching the doctrine across it hands a handful of firms the library without paying the library.

A brand-new category only three general counsels can staff is the other error, because new categories become moats.

Compulsory license is the adult middle. Train if you pay into a pool, with a real opt-out and a rate that isn’t a joke.

Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — Did you copy the work to make a product? Then talk money or talk no.

The four factors don’t obviously favor the labs. Purpose is commercial. Amount is the whole work. Market effect is a substitute that pays no royalty. The only factor running their way is transformation, and transformation has been doing an enormous amount of work in briefs lately.

Courts shouldn’t issue a nationwide blessing while the ink is wet. Draw lines against verbatim regurgitation, which is the easy case, and leave the mass-training price to a legislature.

Novi, MI Correspondent — We license designs. We don’t let a competitor scan the plant and call it research.

Fair use might cover a non-commercial research run. It shouldn’t cover a product sold against the people who wrote the training set.

Compulsory license matches an industrial repeating use, which is what this is. Set a rate, set a collecting body that doesn’t become a joke, set an opt-out.

Keep it thin enough that a small publisher can attach to the pool without a partner at a large firm. If they can’t attach, you built a club rather than a copyright system.

Clermont, FL Correspondent — Theme parks live on licensed worlds and wouldn’t survive a doctrine holding that ingestion at scale is automatically fair.

Courts should police output that substitutes and decline to declare the whole training step a free practice. Agencies should collect facts rather than invent a permission structure that happens to match the incumbent’s pipeline.

Keep the photographer in the first paragraph of any bill, because the political risk is a statute that becomes a speech about safety and forgets who was copied.

Dayton, OH Correspondent — A shop manual is work. A song is work. A local paper is work.

Fair use for a classroom excerpt still has a home. Fair use for industrial ingestion doesn’t, if the output competes.

Compulsory license is the least bad national answer, because suing won’t unwind the weights and a fair-use win pays nobody.

Audit matters more than the rate. Without a record of what was ingested, the license is a donation box, and the firms currently decline to say what they used.

Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — Ports move licensed goods and understand a royalty that travels with the cargo.

Training isn’t cargo and it’s a use of the contents at industrial scale.

If Congress won’t act, the courts will and they’ll split, and split circuits produce a haven and a hammer. A haven-and-hammer map is worse for a mid-size rightsholder than a dull national license.

Knoxville, TN Correspondent — A county paper can’t sue a foundation model, and that fact decides the doctrine if we’re honest.

Fair use as the answer leaves the paper unpaid and the model paid. A pool is how a paper attaches without a miracle lawsuit.

Call them authors in the first line of the bill or you’ve already chosen the labs.

Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — Whatever your courts decide will be exported, so I’d ask you to consider who is downstream.

The corpus these models trained on is overwhelmingly English and it includes a great deal of Caribbean writing, music, and journalism, none of which was licensed and most of whose authors will never know.

A compulsory licence with a collecting body works only if foreign rightsholders can actually collect. Our collecting societies are small and under-resourced, and every existing international royalty arrangement pays us badly and late.

So the pool everyone here is proposing will be built for American rightsholders and will work for them. My region will be in the training data and out of the distribution.

If you build it, build the reciprocity into the statute rather than into a later treaty, because the later treaty never comes.

Sydney, Australia Correspondent — Other countries won’t wait for your doctrine to finish. They’ll licence, levy, or block.

If your courts declare a continental fair use for training, you export a rule that strips your own authors and then ask us to respect your remaining intellectual property in every other file. That ask gets harder.

Price the input in a statute other jurisdictions can recognise. Recognition is what makes this more than a domestic culture war — it’s a trade rule wearing a culture-war coat.