Electronic copies are copies. Copying the story is a copy. You need a license to copy someone's work. You unconditionally do not need a license to learn from it and use that knowledge for any purpose you wish. There are no laws that could possibly be interpreted to require this.
Derivative works are copies using substantial portions of someone else's original work. You need a license to adapt a book into a movie because you're copying their whole story, characters, etc. You don't need a license to tell a similar story from a similar idea because you are not. Literally everything that has been created in the past 10,000 years is built on the ideas of others. Everything is a derivative work if you think learning from an article is. You're allowed to summarize copyrighted material and present your own interpretation of it to others. You're allowed to do so commercially. It isn't copying.
The New York Times owns their articles. They own their specific packaging of the facts inside. They don't and unconditionally can't own the facts themselves. Nothing they own is being copied. Having files in memory is not copyright infringement. It's the literally guaranteed result of publishing anything digitally.
There is nothing that OpenAI is doing that any law in existence even loosely implies might need a license.