> If any individual "economically harmed in an intellectually honest sense" if PG&E overcharges every subscriber five cents on every bill?

No. Nobody cares.

> But it's still something we do as a society, for good reasons, right?

I really don't think whatever you're talking about matters. I don't think anyone cares about class action lawsuits over pennies except assholes. But I enjoy that you are reading these comments.

I also think you are ascribing way too much meaning to the legal process. Process and procedure matter to lawyers. There are places where you can never get relief from the law, and there is no process and procedure, but oftentimes, people will concede that they are governed by rules and laws.

In the US the starkest example was probably the BP oil spill, where they had video of oil coming out of the thing, there was nothing to investigate, and in 15m a meeting between political and business executives concluded that the fine would be large but not ruin BP. The next 2 years of process for that disaster were meaningless under the same framework of meaning I gave you. It provided psychological satisfaction to all sorts of people, maybe especially to the people who had to feel good about taking a big check from BP for destroying the ecosystem except by fishing instead of by extracting oil. But it didn't matter, they could have also not done 2 years of process and nothing would change.

> Here, you have a number of commercial entities that are poised to make a ton of money off individually small but entirely non-consensual contributions of other people.

The Pile is doing the exact opposite, and unauthorized but nonetheless legal use of copyrighted material for LLM training is the only way you will see a world where non-commercial entities, such as authors, can use the technology for free, in whatever way they choose it to be aligned, under whatever rules.

The DMCA already made movie piracy cost $100,000 a pop more than 2 decades ago, and yet here we are. Who. Cares. Did any of it work? You can find lots of bad guys in movie piracy, and extremely few good guys, and it turns out none of it matters. Surely if we can tolerate them we can tolerate the Pile.

> We're not talking about academics tinkering with wacky ideas.

You might mean that they specifically are not graduate students or professors at Universities, sure, but they are all Ivory tower, bone dry Ivy League or adjacent academics. Some of the people at the very top may have dropped out of Stanford or Harvard or whatever, and some of them may have some nuanced or fringe beliefs about specific journeys through learning for specific people, but they are very much the kind of person who would be called "academic," as an insult, by a layperson.

This is just to say that you are immediately reaching for the good versus bad people appeals. Like it's the same shit, it's the same energy as saying the authors are right and the weirdos are wrong. You have some favorable idea in your head of nice humanities PhDs, and yes, they are nice, and this disfavorable view of mean compsci bachelors, but does it matter? In a real sense they are cut from a similar cloth, but in the imaginary setup in your head they're different.

> We're talking about an industry that takes your work without asking and monetizes it.

This is the same appeal. Authors Guild is the industry. Writers Guild is the industry. You are mixing up your antagonists and protagonists. You need to get an independent opinion, colorfully we could call it a "contrarian" one, about who all these people really are. And then you'll see, man, it's not so black and white, and I wonder why people are arguing about this shit that does not matter. If you are a guilded writer, I will tell you now, you are wasting your time worrying about this stuff, because monetizing via traditional publishing or screenplays has been bad forever, and the Pile changes nothing.