Since whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way.
Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model?
> Since whole chunks of these books can be recited verbatim by these models, to which they sell access, they absolutely are republishing and reselling these books' content in a way.
They are absolutely not "republishing" in any meaningful sense of the term. A chunk is not a whole book, and even getting a modern LLM to reproduce such a large chunk of an arbitrary book is not a trivial task. I have never heard of anyone who actively used LLMs for book piracy.
> Like I remember a research paper that managed to recreate the whole of a Harry Potter book from a model?
Even if that is true (it may well be false), this is likely far too difficult for any normal person to exploit, and moreover, even less likely to succeed for the great majority of other books who aren't nearly as famous.
Just because it's not a reasonable way to pirate stuff, doesn't make it legal -- just try your luck with Disney and let's see when they bite. Why would we let one company ignore the law, while rudelessly enforcing it in other cases? That's just state sponsorship with extra steps.