The fact of the matter here is that parties, such as OpenAI, are benefiting from others' knowledge work, protected or not, in a completely one-sided way and all for free. And I don't feel sorry for companies that need to build Trojan horse products, such as OpenAI and Google, in order to survive off of other people's data that they never compensate for.
Someone else made the analogy - if you read a NYT article and then go do a stock trade based on what you read, didn’t you do that based on value generated by them, and why wouldn’t they own that too?
Like if you don’t want to talk analogies then talk principles, and humans are diffusion machines. When you write a term paper from sources you are simply diffusing those words into a new arrangement, but it’s still fundamentally someone else’s work. Why do you get to profit off the model that results from someone else’s work?
Copyright has mutated into this bizarre chimaera where people (like NYT) are essentially claiming ownership of ideas (and derivative works fall into a similar space) and that’s inherently in conflict with a system that is supposed to promote the creation of works. But it has turned into this bizarre shibboleth that if you came up with an idea it’s yours for life+75 years, completely yours and nobody else can work off it or remix it without crediting you. And that’s an unusual state, humanity hasn’t existed like this forever, the Berne convention is only 50 years old and already falling apart from unintended consequences.
Anyway there’s no proof that copyright benefits the small guy more than corporations. Disney squashing someone for writing a Star Wars fan fiction happens a lot more than Disney ripping off someone’s fanfic character for their series. Like patents there’s this mythos of it benefiting the small guy and that’s absolutely not how it works in the real world.
Also, NYT is a particularly egregious plaintiff here because they’re essentially just factual reporting of occurrences, which (like a phone book) are not really copyrightable in itself. You can copy a phone book without infringing copyright and you can train an AI model on a phonebook, and training an AI model on NYT in particular is basically doing that but for historical facts and occurrences. The fact that this costs money for NYT to generate is irrelevant, this is the “sweat of the brow” doctrine and was already swept aside by the phone book case. Just because you spent time/money making it doesn’t mean it’s copyrightable. A large amount of NYT comment is factual observation and tabulation and probably is not copyrightable in the first place. But separating that out is of course going to be challenging for NYT’s lawyers!