Charging for access to the data feed seems fair enough, but licensing the data? For a company that has a monopoly over what I consider public data £18k is outrageous.
Basically there's no way they would let a player like Bloomberg forward that kind of data to their users without getting paid a lot. In fact if you work in HFT you might have heard of something called a non-display fee which is a kind of ransom money they make that kind of firm pay.
Consumers like the ones who look at finance websites are probably not people they care to market to. Hence someone like investing.com can cut a deal to show live prices. They're not depth and pretty slow in any case.
But basically Bloomberg do not own the equity prices, the exchanges do.
AFAIK that's what grsecurity does. They distribute linux patches, which aren't copyrightable because they're GPL. To prevent anyone from distributing their patches openly (and putting them out of business), they have a clause in their contracts saying that if you distribute their patches, they'll terminate your subscription.
FICC prices are also not quite that easy, there's a number there but what it means varies according to how you're configured. Things like the closing time and what sources go into the rate make a difference.
I spent a lot of time talking to bbg about what all the settings were.