The monetary price for AI to access products of human creative endeavour
So-called AIs, or any human being for that matter, seeking to access, and perhaps use, information upon which current laws confer proprietorial 'rights', are, if they abide by current rules, customers in a rigged market.
Digitally encoded information is sold as if physical property. Yet, because sequences of digits have no unique physical presence, as would be the pretence when they are inscribed on a physical medium, they inevitably lack scarcity unless kept under lock and key, and chiselled into blocks of stone which require exertion for removal by a thief.
Scarcity is the foundation of market-economics. It has been since the recorded dawn of humanity. That which is scarce can be bartered for other things. Eventually, conveniently portable scarce objects (e.g. gold coinage) made trading more flexible. Nowadays, we use pieces of paper (or digital abstractions therefrom) in which we place trust that other people too will regard them as acceptable alternatives to gold, silver, etc.
The scarcity of supply (or of ease of access) for goods and services, coupled with demand and competition in supply, determine the current price.
Things lacking inherent scarcity, e.g. salt (sodium chloride crystals) found in huge deposits, as in the English county of Cheshire, are marketable too. The (retail) vendor is offering the considerable convenience of the product having being dug out, cleaned, and packaged, over the hassle of searching directly for deposits. Because what is in the packet has little intrinsic monetary worth, competition centres upon presentation, and the overall price remains very low.
Digital sequences have zero intrinsic scarcity but, just like table salt, they can be 'packaged' in various manners e.g. curated collections, and reliable Internet access (including streaming). However, attempts to put a price on individual sequences, no matter the cost of their production, are spurious. Only the artifice of imposed supposed scarcity via legally enforced monopoly rights can make a basis for 'price'. Yet, in the total absence of competition in providing any particular sequence, prices are arbitrary; they are determined by what 'the market can bear' (i.e. what people are willing to pay) instead of 'price discovery' in an ethos of competition.
In other contexts of markets, monopoly (and monopsony) powers are deemed unacceptable. Nations have 'antitrust laws'. However, in this Neoliberal era of broken markets and of conglomeration, law of that nature is little enforced.
Transition from the analogue to digital era has occasioned considerable worry among people anachronistically claiming ideas (however incarnated) as property like oxen, asses, and motorcars. Initially, concern arose over the increasing ease with which information expressed in analogue form could be copied (e.g. home taping and early varieties of photocopying). Full-blown domestic access to writable digital storage devices, and later ease of sharing 'content' via the Internet, were the beginning of the inevitable demise of digital 'rentier' economics.
AI's voracious appetite for digitally expressed information cannot be quelled/regulated globally. There shall always be Internet connected AIs accessible to the public, many of these being beyond the jurisdictions of IP rentiers. Perhaps, AI is the final straw to break the back of ersatz scarcity and the attendant sense of entitlement it arouses.
Whine and whinge as they might, copyright rentiers shall soon be powerless to stultify creativity and access to knowledge.