Isn't that how the whole system operates? Everyone is a conduit to allow rich people to enrich themselves further. The amount and quality of opportunities any individual receives are proportional to how well it serves existing capital.

So long as there is an excuse to justify money flows, that's fine, big capital doesn't really care about the excuse; so long as the excuse is just persuasive enough to satisfy the regulators and the judges.

Money flows happen independently, then later, people try to come up with good narratives. This is exactly what happened in this case. They paid the authors a lot of money as a settlement and agreed on a narrative which works for both sets of people; that training was fine, it's the pirating which was a problem...

It's likely why they settled; they preferred to pay a lot of money and agree on some false narrative which works for both groups rather than setting a precedent that AI training on copyrighted material is illegal; that would be the biggest loss for them.