>Steelmanning against this, when you publish any form of content online you have to be prepared for the consequences of it's digital proliferation.
when you walk down the street in skimpy dress you have you have to be prepared for the consequences too, right? Whatever you're trying to say it has nothing to do with what rights companies have to use content.
The point is that you cannot claim damages to something that you give away for free. What did they take from you, notoriety? Content? Traffic?
When the Author's Guild pressed Google for their indexing of plaintext copywritten books, they lost in court. Transforming freely-available content can't be gatekept because the intent isn't strictly what the author imagined. There is a degree of fair use that exists when you make anything public. Music, art, text, videos, all of it can be consumed in novel and unexpected ways. People haven't been concerned about the legal ramifications of abusing intellectual property since teenage Neil Cicierega made Mr Rogers fight Batman in 2005: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrzKT-dFUjE
> you cannot claim damages to something that you give away for free
Maybe you can't claim damages based on loss of income, but that's not the only kind of damages.
For example, say I post an article and don't charge anything for reading it, and an LLM, based on its training data which includes my article, generates an article in my writing style. Sure, it hasn't cost me any money, but it might still affect my reputation if people think I wrote the article. Copyright is supposed to cover cases like that as well as cases where income is lost.
when you walk down the street in skimpy dress you have you have to be prepared for the consequences too, right? Whatever you're trying to say it has nothing to do with what rights companies have to use content.