> Of course they want to get paid for it.

So should the original authors, no? That is, getting a share of that payment.

Something akin to the German GEMA could work, an entity that levies a usage fee on behalf of all copyright holders and re-distributes to its members, but on a global scale.

> So should the original authors, no? That is, getting a share of that payment.

Should they? Yes. Will they?

Well, do LLM model builders pay for any copyrighted work so far?

Well, not yet. It's a matter of organization, regulation and litigation.

I was thinking along the lines of concepts that already exist, such as the private copying levy [0]. It basically forces a blanket tax on a certain class of products, which then gets redistributed to members of a collecting society such as GEMA [1].

This way, you would force LLM model builders to effectively pay a tax by law. Since these models do not work at all without underlying content, make it proportionate. Let's say 50-70% to make it fair.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEMA_(German_organization)