Scale & Strategy
This is Scale & Strategy, your business weather man – helping you navigate the storms, and embrace the sunshine!
Here’s what we got for you today:
- Anthropic Scores Partial Win in AI Copyright Fight
- The Next Big Distribution Shift Is Already Here
Anthropic Scores Partial Win in AI Copyright Fight
A federal judge just handed Anthropic a mixed—but meaningful—victory in its ongoing legal battle with a group of authors over AI training data.
The core ruling:
Training AI models on legally purchased books qualifies as fair use.
But not everything went Anthropic’s way...
Here’s what happened:
- The judge called Anthropic’s model “spectacularly transformative,” likening Claude’s training to a student learning by reading—not copying—authors' work.
- The authors couldn’t prove that Claude reproduced their actual writing or created market competition, weakening their argument around economic harm.
- Court documents revealed Anthropic spent “many millions” legally buying and scanning print books for training purposes.
- However—and this is key—Anthropic also downloaded 7 million pirated books and stored them permanently in their dataset.
- That part? Not fair use. The judge ruled it violated authors’ rights and will now head to trial in December.
- If found liable, Anthropic could face damages of up to $150,000 per book.
Why this matters:
This sets a major precedent: training AI on legitimately obtained content is likely fair game. That’s huge for every tech company wrestling with copyright risk.
But it also draws a clear red line: scrape pirated data, and you’ll pay.
This isn’t the final word—but it’s one of the first. Expect a long legal slog as the courts shape the rules for how AI learns.
The Next Big Distribution Shift Is Already Here
We’re building like it’s 2025—but still distributing like it’s 2015.
AI has radically changed how we create. Personalized products, smart agents, conversational interfaces—everyone’s innovating. But most marketers are still stuck thinking in old channels: SEO, social, paid.
That’s not going to cut it much longer.
All signs point to ChatGPT becoming the next great distribution platform—the first since Google and Facebook. And if you understand how these platforms evolve, you know the opportunity window is short.
Brian Balfour recently outlined a pattern every major platform follows. Here’s the cycle—and what it means right now:
- Find a Moat Google had search intent. Facebook had the social graph. Apple had hardware. OpenAI? It’s got daily usage behavior, massive retention, and a foothold in both consumer and enterprise.
Moat established.
- Open the Gates This is the golden phase. Platforms roll out APIs. Organic reach is abundant. Distribution is cheap, integrations get preferred placement, and partnerships feel like actual partnerships.
That’s where ChatGPT is now.
- Close the Gates Once the ecosystem is locked in, the tollbooths go up. Organic dies. The rules shift. Metrics vanish. You pay to play—on someone else’s terms.
Google did it. Facebook did it. Slack did it. OpenAI will too.
So what should you be doing right now? Integrate early, but keep your leverage. Use ChatGPT distribution while it’s cheap, but don’t build your whole business on it.
Ask yourself:
What part of this ecosystem do we actually own?
What habits are we building with users—ours or theirs?
What data do we control?
Because here’s the truth: Platforms help you grow… until they don’t. They can also replace you in a heartbeat.
ChatGPT isn’t just another tool. It’s the next major channel—and possibly the next monopolized one.
And if you wait too long to adapt, you’ll be distributing like it’s 2015 while the winners are already writing the new rules.
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