That sounds nice except that it didn't happen. They scraped this off many sites whose authors published the material in ways that wouldn't legally allow that. T

That sounds nice except that it didn't happen. They scraped this off many sites whose authors published the material in ways that wouldn't legally allow that. They often publish for a mix of self interest and public benefit. The more you look, the more you find that much altruism is actually self-interest at work. Some have specific terms, too. Let's look at examples in The Pile. It might be something that's part of their job, requires citations since they value credit, optionally bans commercial use, and maybe has a patent. Arxiv papers are a mix of that. Many on StackOverflow and Hacker News want attribution with some asserting copyright in their comments. Film producers usually want the subtitles to accompany sales of their movies. For FreeLaw, the material is public by law about people who might have never even wanted to testify or be remembered. FreeLaw itself was seeking donations for its service with an additional request to protect the names of people in the dataset. StackOverflow's license explicitly bans copying their data without permission with many individual users also wanting self-promotion to happen side by side with their answers. So, many things that are in The Pile are works people published hoping to gain some benefit in return. They often had terms that banned their reproduction in ways that prevented them from getting that benefit. They were just public for humans to read and learn from. Some allowed sharing but just wanted credit. The A.I. users of these works ignore all of that by taking what they made conditionally available without meeting the conditions that benefit the authors. Whereas, if you got the same content on Hacker News or Arxiv, the authors might benefit from it. Even a pirate would benefit them more than A.I. companies because the users would often at least know the author or source site. So, the fruits of their labor were taken, not given, by those who are the least beneficial to them. I will note that some people do publish truly free content that has no strings attached. Mostly public domain or CC-0. Those are exceptions that might fit your description.