"Over time, legal but paid alternatives rose up: Spotify, iTunes, Netflix. These players found their place in the market by balancing the interest of copyright

"Over time, legal but paid alternatives rose up: Spotify, iTunes, Netflix. These players found their place in the market by balancing the interest of copyright holders and the needs of users looking for cheap and easy access to entertainment." You didn't mention one of the largest (perhaps even the largest) distributor of copyright content (which happens to also be free, for now): YouTube. You can watch/listen to endless amounts of copyrighted content (and other types of content) on there completely for free, and to say it's tremendously popular would be an understatement. Google has made it work through ads. Perhaps something like that will happen with image-generating AI.