Yes, thanks. I think I agree with you here. The copyright model is rent-seeking by nature. And we could likely do better.

Ultimately a book author wants to sell his product to me. How it's done isn't ideal at all, but that's kind of his motivation. So I don't think you want him to starve because books aren't a valid product to sell, but it's about the way it's done.

My single argument here is: Look at the AI industry and compare what you just said. They're doing exactly the same thing, just 20 times worse. And you should be opposed to that, too!

You're making the argument that OpenAI and others are trying to get paid. That's not rent-seeking. Ideally, our laws ensure that seeking money makes you work for the benefit of other people.

I've laid down how the big AI companies do nothing for the benefit of other people. I've asked you what you think they contribute (in case I'm wrong) and you also came up with zero things they do for other people. So it boils down pretty much to the same. A book author creates intellectual property to sell a product to people "trying to get paid". An AI company creates intellectual property to sell a product in order "to get paid". It's the same thing.

Let's tackle monopolies: Everyone can read a book in case they can get ahold of it. And with some intelligence and time, everyone can write a book. That's a monopoly in your eyes. And while we have weird concepts like Fixed book price, that's mainly meant to foster healthy competition and promote the sales of interesting books rather than just blockbusters. Though, I really have a wide selection of sci-fi books available and I've bought several of them for 50ct. And I have a public library card for 26€ a year and I can read 500 books a day if I like, and I get a selection of blue-rays on top. That's what the monopoly does to me. (With everything else I agree with you. It's bad that they pile that information up and that it's not freely available but a business model.)

Now AI: I wanted to try Sora because they pioneered video models on that scale. For a long time they said "no thanks" to me. We won't provide that service to you, it's just for testing and a select few people we like. You get none of it. You can't even pay, no matter how much. Then I waited for half a year and wanted to try Google's Veo 3 and seems the interesting stuff is in the $100 a month tier. And what the fuck, the output is supposed to come with copyright? And terms and conditions?

I can't get that service anywhere else and they just say tough luck, it's gonna be $100 to try 8s video snippets because the company is amongst the select few who offer that (...cough...monopoly...). Or use Sora, now that it's available, but they've changed the model to their likings and it became a bit worse than the initial trailers, and by the way: that is $200 a month.

So yeah, fantastic prices, also quite random, offered by less than a handful of mega corporations, based on their IP, they design "the food" so I need to eat what they devised for me. And I can't even eat the food the way I like, but have to follow their terms and procedures.

Same applies to text gen AI. It's a monopoly of billion dollar companies who get to shape it. Me or you, we can't do it. It's almost impossible to train a base model on that scale. And I can't even use them for what I like. I wanted to try story-writing and chose some dark sci-fi and a murder mystery story, and it's designed to refuse service to me. Instead it'll give long lectures about ethics to me about how murder is wrong. Yeah, no shit sherlock. Interestingly, AIstudio did help me write exploits for computer security vulnerabilities for some blue-teaming I did.

In you analogy with the food: I'm hungry. Now a company comes. Of course they don't offer me the food I like, but they say I have to eat what they designed for me. And it's going to be a random $100 or $200. And I can't touch the food or eat it myself, they're adamant in spoon-feeding it as a very specific service to me. I can never cook my own food, since the resources for that cost like $100 million. And they keep the recipe a closely guarded secret and they're so obsessed with it, they don't even tell me the nutritional value or anything about what went in to the designer food I need to lick off their spoon.

If you want in on the business. Also tough luck. You now need to start from scratch with everything, since the data is hoarded by the big players and they don't share. On the level of ChatGPT... Well, you can get in like Microsoft and pay some billion dollars. But with that kind of money, it's not super accessible, exactly like you'd expect from a monopoly. Other players can get in, like the Chinese. And how do they do it? It's sponsored/subsidised with billions of dollars by the government. And that's what it takes and they do it this way for more than a decade now.

[...] some guy who's searching through libraries and archives for stuff to digitize [...]

That's kind of a difficult example. I think archiving and digitizing is okay and in most cases he can do it. Copying for own use is always fine and that's phrased so it applies to companies as well. Archival is such an allowed use. Public libraries have a seperate paragraph. They can copy and can do necessary changes like digitizing. That applies to commercial libraries as well, as long as they're open to the public. So we have you covered here. And there is more. For some works it's mandatory to preserve them. They need to be sent to a library and the government specifically takes care to preserve (European) culture with these things. They're mandated for example to show up in the shelves of the national library.

I seriously doubt the AI companies are going to help with preserving culture, though. The incident with Meta torrenting books for example had them on the opposite side. They took care to "leech". That is, they took out information from the network and made sure not to balance that out. Resulting in a negative balance on the network and "free" information exchange.
If your worried "our guy can get more. If he destroys all remaining copies of these newspapers [...]" I believe you found him. It's not exactly that, since that kind of information is duplicated and can't be burnt that way. But Meta do the closest thing there is to it. There are resources to exchange information and culture, and they deliberately "burn" those resources for their own benefit and to the disadvantage of everyone else.

If the publisher has gone out of business [...]

And that has also already happened in the realm of AI. They change their service or cease operation. And since AI is just a service and the users don't own anything, they're then left with nothing. First big thing I'm aware of is how Replika AI dropped the main use-case of their service and millions of people were affected. And that is way worse than books. I have been banned from services. They just said "suspicious behaviour" and deactivated my account and I was stripped access. A book author cannot do that. I can still buy his book even if he doesn't like me. Cancelling service and doing whatever they like with the userbase is what big tech companies do.

So my argument is: You've really made a good argument in pointing out countless severe shortcomings of current copyright culture. And I've learned a lot. The AI industry is an even worse manifestation of that. They also pile up intellectual property for their product. And contrary to a book, I don't even own the darn physical thing, but they introduce all kinds of other shenanigans and make it something I rent, boarded-up, and then they often also apply copyright on top. They stepped up everything that is bad about copyright, several notches.

And then the successful players are all ruthless. They're not just selling me a book. Currently they're mainly interested in investment money and I'm not really 100% their customer. They happily weigh down on society. In my last comment I addressed how they deliberately evade law and some big players even pirate and do things that are currently illegal. Just for their own benefit. Enshittification of the internet is a side-effect they gladly accept. And they're expected to displace more things with their product (including culture) and neither do they contribute back, nor do they care about the consequences.

I think Fair Use might be a nice concept. It definitely is a regulation mechanism. The government/society is taking away privileges of people (copyright holders) with that. To the benefit of society and progress. Now go ahead and apply the same thing to AI companies! Regulate them as well!