Yes they always give some sort of excuse to go for the megacorp, the billionaire. Remember the judgements that because 9 year olds in a basement "orchestrate" the copyright crime of copying buffers with copyrighted data in Telco's network and routers those 9 year olds should go to jail?
This was the court's excuse, because copyright doesn't technically say there's anything illegal about downloading, yet they still wanted the 9 year old in jail, so buffer copies counted as uploads. Of course, the party that actually did the vast majority of the copying, the Telco, being a megacorp, wasn't responsible (like any other party would be: if you get paid or even deceived into committing a crime you are very much guilty of that crime. It is not a defense, not even if you didn't realize, and will generally get your sentence further increased). This became the crime that the 9 year old was guilty of, nobody else involved (except of course the parents, who had to pay)
And now that megacorps, including Microsoft of all companies, got caught violating literally hundreds of millions of copyright licences ... we simply declare that to be OK (retroactively OK even, which is NOT something either Congress or the president even have the power to do) ... with another ridiculous excuse (okay a 2-part ridiculous exuse):
1) AI chatbots are the originators of copyright (despite copyright law saying only people can be the originators of the right in copyright)
(why? Because if they didn't originate copyright, it wouldn't be allowed in copyright law for the owners of the model to say who the copyright belongs to, ie. customers wouldn't be legally allowed to say they made the chatbot output. And that this violates the law? Oh well)
2) AI models, despite both the models themselves AND their output obviously being based on the works of humans, as described both in every paper on ML going back 70+ years AND that being the very goal, the very purpose of AI in the first place (to reproduce their inputs) ... aren't
Question: how do I get this sort of treatment from courts? After all, a billion dollar company idea is very easy if you just get to violate the law at such enormous scale. How about I build the Netflix everyone wants? How do I get courts to, say, that if I use the "I" ML model described in math literature going back a hundred years, the output is owned by me? I, being the identity of course, the model that just copies it's input verbatim to it's output. Then, with this court's exact reasoning applied here to avoid billionaire liability, I don't just own the copyright on the output (ie. Disney's movies, and everyone else's, and all books, and ...) (because the output is 100% identical to the input), but I get to sell all the rights on it, including derivative rights. So not only do I get to sell these movies, but I even get money if they make a sequel.
Yet "somehow", I won't get the billionaire's treatment at the courts, will I?
I mean, why do courts even bother? We should empty the buildings (great savings to be had there!), hammer the doors shut and just put up a plaque at the entrance "pay the billionaire, peasant". It'd be a lot more honest.
Again, the court didn't rule on AI authorship, so your interpretation "1) AI chatbots are the originators of copyright" is wrong. It only ruled that the AI output was not the plaintiffs' work, therefore they couldn't claim that their work was being distributed, although they could've claimed (but didn't) that a work infringing on their copyright over their work was being distributed.
You can get what you call the "billionaire's treatment" by hiring a lawyer who understands the distinction between those two situations, who can accordingly pick the right law for you to sue under.
You're totally misunderstanding. How can I get courts to find these sorts of ridiculous excuses to avoid I am held liable, as opposed to billionaires?
Actually your reasoning would still work: how do I get a court to say that AI outputs aren't copyrighted by what went into the AI? How do I get a court to say that if I use the simplest Transformer network possible, "I", in math terms, and get a court to judge that it's output is under my copyright, or at least not under Disney's? Obviously I is the "identity" network, which just reproduces it's input.
Oh and don't worry. There's a variant of I that reproduces it's training data too, the exact thing the copyright office approved? It's a lot larger, but it's not like you need to actually calculate it's output, so that doesn't even matter ...
How do I get courts to not say "heyhey, peasant, Disney's the billionaire company here, YOU will be paying THEM".
How do I get the AI lab deal for my Netflix-without-copyright-but-with-identity-ML project?
How do I get courts to make the same utterly ridiculous reasoning they made here, against MY liability towards a billionaire company? To be utterly unreasonable like they are here, except benefitting me?
I mean that the mere idea that the court will respect its reasoning here is so ridiculous that nobody's even willing to try it. Well, except Sam Altman and Amodei and other tech billionaires.
If you insist on the identity transformation, you'll fail even the basic "are these two different works or the same?" test that decided the court case you cited, so that's not going to work.
Saying 2 works are identical because the bytes are identical is the mathematical definition of identical. It's the very first axiom, generally referred to as the "reflexive property". "x=x". It says that, for mathematical purposes, a 3 made of concrete and a 3 made of candy are the same thing, because it doesn't differ in essential properties. In every mathematical equation you can always say that both x's are obviously different: they don't have the same position of the page! So this axiom really is needed and really does mean something.
But the point is: courts are absolutely famous for ignoring mathematical reality. Like in this case. The whole purpose of the entire field of ML is "universal approximation", which can be very accurately described as making 2 functions the same, using backprop with transformers being one way to do that. The whole point of making something like ChatGPT or Claude is that the outputs would NOT be different from the output of these programmers. And the judge ignored the entire field to make this judgement. The judge ignored one meaning of identical in favor of another, and what do you know, it just happens to be the one to give all the money to billionaires.
As you point out, obviously the judge will do the exact opposite reasoning to protect billionaires as well. They will protect Disney against these programmers making AI versions of Disney movies, based on their real movies, either through identity transformation (there is, of course, no "equality test", because even a dvdrip and a dvd aren't the same, not even when decoded the pixels don't match). We both know this to be true 99.999%. Hence "excuse". Exactness doesn't matter. And if I make 50 AI slop versions (all of which are different) of all movies in existence, and create a Netflix showing them, we all know that the judge will judge against me in the first 5 minutes to protect huge companies' revenues.
The only question that remains is what happens when the inevitable comes, and an AI company billionaire produces an obvious duplicate of a movie [2], and we see a billionaire vs billionaire case. Given that it's Elon Musk that might get sued and what he's done, I'm guessing it'll depend on which party gets elected.
But I repeat my question: how do I get the courts to make philosophically defensible choices where I get the money? Clearly the judge decided that this mathematically identical output of these programmers does not mean they hold copyright. And as you agree, an AI changed disney movie the judge will make the opposite judgement to protect Disney's billions. Well, how do I get the judge to take the exact same position on Disney movies, to throw Disney under the bus and protect me and give me money instead? I'll make the Netflix everyone wants with it. So how do I get the judge to have my back instead of some billionaire's back? Both viewpoints are obviously both valid, or at least philosophically defensible. How do I get the judge to pick the side where I get the money and not some billionaire.
[1] https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20251111-german-court-...
[2] https://variety.com/2026/film/news/elon-musks-grok-ai-genera...