Then they should. The first transaction will appropriately value content and then WaPo, WSJ and others will see their values to up.

Would be cheaper to license textbooks and find a way to provide attribution to accommodate Wikipedia etc.

Honestly I've always wondered what would happen (and how much the entertainment world would change) if a company like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc did just that. Or heck, if it turns out you need the rights to train LLMs and its easier to do that with public domain stuff, they just flat out bought half the entertainment industry and assigned everything to the public domain. Every Disney work every for example.

No-one is going to buy a major media company and then throw the rights into the public domain. What they would do is buy the rights and then sue all competitors in the GenAI space.

> and assigned everything to the public domain

In the US, this isn't possible. There is no legal mechanism for putting things into the public domain outside of the expiration of the term of copyright. The best you can do is to promise not to enforce your copyright.

MPAA and RIAA are not joint-stock companies, they are specialised trade unions to enforce intellectual property. They have no shares to acquire. If you mean acquiring the individual members, that would encounter an enforcement from your favourite antitrust enforcement commission.