The machines were trained on the library. The library was not asked.

A printing press used to need a plate. A model needs a corpus. The plate was paid for. The corpus, in too many cases, was taken — scanned, stored, shredded into tokens, and denied as a reprint because no page was bound.

Independent authors noticed first, the way small shops notice a theft before a chain store does. Then came the lawsuits, the discovery letters, the exhibits in which a company explains that it cannot possibly build the future if it is required to ask.

This is not an argument against computation. It is an argument about consent. A press that spent twenty years lecturing civilians about intellectual property now shrugs when the property is a book's spine in a warehouse and the buyer is a model.

Watch the language. 'Fair use' is stretched until it covers an industrial copy of a civilization's shelves. 'Safety' is stretched until it covers a decision to bury a political opponent's domain. When the same firms write both sentences, you are not in a market. You are in a ministry.

We will follow the dockets, not the keynotes. Keynotes are theater. Dockets still have exhibits.