>Anthropic spent "many millions of dollars" buying used print books, then stripped off the bindings, cut the pages, and scanned them into digital files.

The judge, Alsup J, ruled that this was lawful.

So they cared at least a bit, enough to spend a lot of money buying books. But they didn't care enough not to acquire online libraries held apparently without proper licensing.

>Alsup wrote that Anthropic preferred to "steal" books to "avoid 'legal/practice/business slog,' as cofounder and CEO Dario Amodei put it."

Aside: using the term steal for copyright infringement is a particularly egregious misuse for a judge who should know that stealing requires denying others of the use of the stolen articles; something which copyright infringement via an online text repository simple could not do.

Using torrented books in a way that possibly (well, almost certainly) violates copyright law is a world of difference from going after your own customers (and revenue) in a way that directly violates the contract that you wrote and had them agree to.