Every now and again I think about the ongoing scam that is academic publishing and indeed copyright. So many venues require copyright transfer and now they can sell our work to whomever including LLM companies. Simple wealth transfer to rentiers for little reason other than tradition.

The Google precedent really was more damaging to author control. We could have decided that indexing in a search engine required an explicit license. It would have been coherent. Similarly we could decide now that use in a training set requires an explicit license. There’s nothing inherent in this.