So what benefit do we derive as a society from deciding that the capability for copyright infringement is in and of itself infringement? What do we gain by overturning the current protections the law (or society) currently has for technologies like xerox machines, VHS tapes, blank CDs and DVDs, media ripping tools, and site scraping tools? Open source digital media encoding, blank media, site scraping tools and bit-torrent enable copyright infringement on a massive scale to the tune of millions or more dollars in losses every year if you believe the media companies. And yet, I would argue as a society we would be worse off without those tools. In fact, I'd even argue that as a society we'd be worse off without some degree of tolerated copyright infringement. How many pieces of interesting media have been "saved" from the dust bin of history and preserved for future generations by people committing copyright infringement for their own purposes? Things like early seasons of Dr Who or other TV shows that were taped over and so the only extant copies are from people's home collections taped off the TV. The "De-specialized" editions of Star Wars are probably the most high quality and true to the original cuts of the original Star Wars trilogy that exist, and they are unequivocally pure copyright infringement.

Or consider the youtube video "Fan.tasia"[1]. That is a collection of unlicensed video clips, combined with another individual's work which itself is a collection of unlicensed audio clips mashed together into a amalgamation of sight and sound to produce something new and I would argue original, but very clearly also full of copyright infringement and facilitated by a bunch of technologies that enable doing infringement at scale. It is (IMO) far more obviously copyright infringement than anything an AI model is. Yet I would argue a world in which that media and the technologies that enable it were made illegal, or heavily restricted to only the people that could afford to license all of the things that went into it from the people who created all the original works, would be a worse world for us all. The ability to easily commit copyright infringement at scale enabled the production of new and interesting art that would not have existed otherwise, and almost certainly built skills (like editing and mixing) for the people involved. That, to me, is more valuable to society than ensuring that all the artists and studios whose work went into that media got whatever fractions of a penny they lost from having their works infringed.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-6xk4W6N20&pp=ygUJZmFuLnRhc...