also treaties I imagine?

It’s not as weird or US-specific as always assumed. If someone brings a case in a US jurisdiction the judge isn’t going to say, “Sorry, they’re international, they’re free to commit those crimes.” They issue a judgment according to the law and leave the enforcement to the limits of jurisdiction.

These judgments aren’t always pointless. Many Internet companies and services intersect with the US in some way, so there could be an angle where this impacts them.

Businesses operating strictly in other countries don’t need to comply with foreign laws except in cases where they need to do business with those countries, at which point it becomes complicated and they may choose to comply to avoid problems or sanctions.

Everyone trained on Anna's Archive.

Were these from the same high-profile publishers?

What was the judgment? Seems that their domains are still active. Why is there a difference in judgment here?

So anyone with deep enough pockets can do it.

However, just because you receive a fine does not mean that you "can't" do it. You've already done it, got caught, now a fine. It does not mean that the LLM model has to be tossed out and destroyed with a new version trained up without that data. It just means can't is a very stupid word to imply here.

there is no confirmed origin for the archivist but only speculation they might be russian or eastern european?