People are not "suddenly protective of some kind of intellectual property". Instead they wonder why some companies can violate those rules on an unprecedented scale whiteout consequences.

I think it's more about the unequal application if those laws. People have had their lives ruined for sharing an mp3. These companies infringe on literally everything and they get rich.

I bet the next step is that the folks vibe coding emulators and replacements for major software suites are going to get serious fines, while artists are going to continue to get ripped off in the name of "innovation".

Well i think the issue is if licenses become worthless then that's also bad for the GPL

Exactly. What happened to "restriction of what a user can do with software or its source code is an infringement upon the users' rights"? I'm not saying that AI companies are acting in the spirit of FOSS, they're not, their models aren't even open-weight (for the most part), but the issue is not the training on materials that ought to be public domain anyway. There's plenty of ethical issues with modern technology. It's not sustainable at all, the supply chain is full of slavery, it generates huge amounts of emissions, etc. People's primary concern being pearl clutching about "plagiarism" shows where their priorities lie. If AI companies have plagiarised then I couldn't care less. It's everything else they're doing that's the problem.