> the entire body of work is actually based on what the sum of researchers did, even those who failed in their research and didn't publish anything.

I don't really see how this is significantly different from them scraping the entire human knowledge, distilling it into weights and then selling the results.

Sure, this argument is about the _new_ data that researchers feed into the machine voluntarily, but I don't see this distinction as significant.

Not making a moral judgement here, just stating that this is consistent with the way those companies operate in general.