they are now, yes. But that was not the case in the beginning, before Google bought it, people uploaded content completely without any regard to intellectual property and YouTube became the dominant streaming media platform and a couple of otherwise fairly skilled but hardly exceptional software engineers were made multi-millionaires) because it was the place to get free stuff that you'd otherwise have to pay for.

Yes and what we're talking about here is that the NYT is trying to get paid royalties as well, just like music & film publishers tried (successfully) to get Youtube to pay them. The long-term survival of ChatGPT may well depend on paying those royalties.