Yes. Journalism is a job. People do the work of turning these happenings into words, and are paid for it. That's what's stolen here. The value created through doing that work.
If it didn't have value, Microsoft would lose nothing by no longer ingesting it.
> Does NYT pays money to the people/countries etc it uses to as subject to create content(NEWS)? Isn't that stealing then?
No, that's why in my reply to "facts like happenings in the world are not copyrightable" I emphasised do the work. Journalism is a job. Happenings do not just fall onto the page.
> Also their website TOS didn't prohibit LLMs from using their data.
This is just lazy. We have rule of law. Individuals don't need to write "don't break law X" to be protected by them. And nytimes does in fact have copyright symbols on its pages - not that it needs them.
There is no rule of law saying LLMs cannot be trained on WWW data.
New York times made it ridiculously easy for anyone to access their content by putting it in WWW for making money from page impressions. And they started ingesting links of their content to social media, search engines, etc.
And now they are acting surprised someone used the content to train an LLM.
Should have done their job in the first place to prevent it from training LLMs and make it less.
But they didn't because that affects their page impressions and ad views.
Because the more open the content the more money they make everyone click on a link and see the ad.
You can't have it both ways.
If you do gambling by making content so open so you can get more views from ads, you also get to enjoy the consequences and not cry like a baby asking for billions by making stupid decisions in the first place.
