Even as a human, you are not allowed to go to all libraries and bookstores in the world, copy their work, and stockpile it for reading later. This is what all of these companies are doing. Comparing AI training to reading is a red herring. The AI training algorithms are not being run on content streamed from the Internet on the fly, which you could maybe defend with this argument.
If a company wants to build an internal library for its employees to train and provide them with manuals, the company has to pay for each book they keep in this library. Sure, they only pay once when they acquire the copy, not every time an employee checks out a copy to read. But they still pay.
So, even if we accepted 100% that AI training is perfectly equivalent to humans reading text and learning from it, that still wouldn't give any right whatsoever to these companies to create their training sets for free.
If a company wants to build an internal library for its employees to train and provide them with manuals, the company has to pay for each book they keep in this library. Sure, they only pay once when they acquire the copy, not every time an employee checks out a copy to read. But they still pay.
So, even if we accepted 100% that AI training is perfectly equivalent to humans reading text and learning from it, that still wouldn't give any right whatsoever to these companies to create their training sets for free.