“Shoplifting” is an odd way of framing the metaphor, implying that the data was for sale in the first place.

Okay but one query combs through 2 billion pieces of information, might use 100-1000 different pieces in the response, so like my “query “ is worth what, 10 cents?

So each piece of data would get $0.001 worth of money per query, leaving almost no money on the table for the algorithm creator and then how are you going to pay for the infrastructure to decide who’s getting money?

…… though if his tech works, it’ll go a long way to explaining how the came up with the answer it did.