Well things are worse in the sense that a different ruling feels really bad for them.

But it means that this case is getting them thousands of dollars instead of one or two purchases, which is a pretty good outcome.

It isn't about sales in the short term. Same with code. Your project might even be OSS (so not expecting profit). Its about a system that exploits that for one party's profit, while putting the other out of business. They reduced the writer's ability to ever be employed again, or to make royalties at the same level as before (not necessarily reduced the sales of existing titles, though that may occur as well).

Same with code, AI hoovering all the code doesn't mean people won't use libCurl, but it does mean jobs are disappearing and people may not be around to write the next libCurl.

Google and the Internet Archive both did/do this with elaborate setups. https://archive.org/details/eliza-digitizing-book_202107

I think anthropic has this operation now

So true! I too think the average person is basically indistinguishable from anthropic.

No. Thats fair use. Format shifting is fair use as affirmed by RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia which was about ripping CDs to MP3s.