I would say it's more, I checked out a book from the library, read it, and learned some things about writing style and storytelling that I'm now going to apply to my own original works.
That has nothing to do with how LLM's were trained. They were trained on countless works for which Meta, etc had acquired no legitimate right for use at all.
I will accept the argument they got the source material in a way where someone broke American law. I really do not think they've broken any laws whatsoever in terms of using it for LLM training
Isn't inducing or offering someone incentives to break laws illegal by itself? I'll admit that isn't specifically an IP law violation, but it can't possibly be kosher.
For example if a buyer of goods can reasonably be expected to know the goods were stolen, they can also be charged. Isn't this the same thing?
Nowadays the surviving public libraries might pay special prices for the right of lending books, but that was not true in the past, when they just bought the books from the market like anyone else, at the same price.
I am pretty sure that the public libraries that I frequented as a child, many decades ago, did not pay anything for a book above the price that I would have paid myself, but nonetheless at that time nobody would have thought that they do not have the right to lend the books to whomever they pleased.
Giving Meta exclusive access to those copies is the problem (which is effectively what we are doing if they are not prosecuted, or, alternatively, if we accepted that LibGen is fair use for everyone).