@cstross @davecb @glynmoody
[Company, business, people] won't relinquish anything [read: asset that we have that has value] they no longer need—ever.
Only forward thinkers, lawyers making companies discard legal liabilities, and declutters get rid of "assets" unless forced. It's why patents and copyrights at one time had relatively short lifespans: to give creators a chance to benefit—and then the public.
Current law changed that. It is criminal that it's now legal to horde.
I can see the reasoning behind the wrong-thinking backlash to burn the system down, which a priori makes creators' labor worthless in order to get that narcotic hit of making all extant knowledge free. End of progressive creativity in that line of thinking.
I don't think the end run by AI companies to copy and reproduce that knowledge is much better. It will simply cause creativity to be devalued over a longer time until most people choose never to create as an avocation. Our world will become progressively greyer; guilds will return in the form of corporations, where processes are guarded and lost and never shared.
The problem is copyright and patent duration extensions. Copyrights went from 14 years plus 14 years if extended by the author themself. 50 years after the death of the author violates the original concept of good for the creator and good for society.
AI companies stealing protected knowledge is a side-effect, but even if copyrights were reasonable, I trust they'd steal and illegally plagiarize from the material anyway. There is no way their business model affords paying for source data, and royalties if creator's style is duplicated devaluing their works. Some non-AI tech companies do train ethically or use ethically trained (e.g. IBM), but using their LLMs is expensive. It makes those of the All Knowledge is Free religion sick with envy. (They will pay for food but never knowledge.) It makes them deranged and mentally ready to fight the war that kills their enemy regardless of the collateral damage, like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Self publishing is the sun streaming through a hole in the rain clouds onto the green knoll in the distance, but I worry that it won't last under the influence of big money and censorship via litigation. Another subject for another day, and a road I expect I'll be traveling with an umbrella. As @cstross pointed out, that little royalty in exchange for marketing, book construction, and distribution (not to mention the curation of publishers only wanting to buy stories they think they can sell) which might translate to big sales numbers still feels like a promised land.
#BoostingIsSharing
. Thank you wonderful people who held the book, appreciated it and bought it. We are grateful to you ! 
