Sure, I think you’re right, it’s reasonable to expect a company to at least buy a single copy of each book (or whatever it eats) it ingests if the work could not otherwise be legally obtained for free. Or something reasonable along those lines
Yes, let’s shut out the small players now go Microsoft can bilk us
It’s not Microsoft’s fault that people are generally required to buy a book in order to read it. You could say the same thing about any business with a high capital cost required to get up and running. Want to start a supermarket? That’s many $Millions to plan, buy/rent land, build the facility, stock the shelves, etc. Starting any business costs money, and some cost a lot of money. Suppliers of the materials or feedstock required to start them aren’t to blame. If I want to fine tune a LLM to be an expert on the Dune book series, should I be allowed to download a copy without paying, or should I have to pay $8 for a copy before I feed it to the model? I’m sure the publisher would want me to pay some ridiculous amount but that is a different argument than requiring the purchase of a single copy that anyone would have to do to get access to the content.