While I mostly agree it's a bit of a nothing burger with respect to copyright, they did achieve long runs of verbatim text. I think ultimately it's going to end up not mattering much because the extent they had to go to will leave a lot of room for lawyers to argue over, and will at worst result in some fines and some further tightening up of guardrails, but it's significantly more than just completing sentence by sentence 70% of the time.
EDIT: Specifically see Table 1 on page 13, which shows the longest "near-verbatim block", which maxes out at 8835 (The Hobbit on Claude 3.7, and is in the thousands for at least one of the novels for all models except GPT-4.1, which maxed out at 821 for Harry Potter 1).
EDIT: Specifically see Table 1 on page 13, which shows the longest "near-verbatim block", which maxes out at 8835 (The Hobbit on Claude 3.7, and is in the thousands for at least one of the novels for all models except GPT-4.1, which maxed out at 821 for Harry Potter 1).