While I agree with your sentiment in general, this thread is about the legal situation and your argument is unfortunately not a legal one.
A legal argument would be needed to argue the other way. This argument would imply granting LLMs some degree of human rights, which the very industry profiting from these copyright violations will never let happen for obvious reasons.
Also, it is only a matter of time until one of those employees (thanks to free will and agency) will whistleblow, it doesn’t scale, etc.
Frankly, the fact that such a big segment of HN crowd unthinkingly buys big tech’s double standard (LLMs are human when copyright is concerned, but not human in every other sense) makes me ashamed of the industry.