Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.

The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.

https://natlawreview.com/article/court-training-ai-model-based-copyrighted-data-not-fair-use-matter-law

It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.

It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.

Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.

I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.

If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.

A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?

I appreciate the reply/description of my life. :)

I have gotten myself some medication, which has helped a lot. I still have the impulse to jump right to the massive project, but now it’s way easier to recognize that “learn how to do it” is a step, and that a smaller project might give fulfillment, in addition to learning how to do it more effectively because you actually finish, or even start.

I’ve also had good luck with teaching myself that sometimes it’s better to do half of task than to be overwhelmed and not do the entire thing.
It’s not ideal to get dressed out of a laundry basket next to the dryer for a month, but all the clothes are there or in the laundry basket, so things look clean and I’m only slightly wrinkly for a few minutes.

Biggest side effect I got from the medication was a tendency towards dry skin and pimples. I actually sleep a little better because I get in bed to read a book when I’m “supposed” to, so when I get sleepy I just… Sleep, instead of idling on the couch for hours.

I learned that many people assess their abilities, and then pick a project that’s reasonable for them, including learning or honing new skills.

As a person who tends to pick a project, and then tries to find the best way to use my current skills and any new ones I can pick up to force it to happen… It just seems wild to me that you can pick a project.