That’s a reasonable argument. But why should we tolerate the two tier system? Why not enforce a restriction on all images? Why do we have to accept someone is above the law?
The only ones, then, who could afford to break the law are also the ones who make the law and own the law. Everyone else is subordinate in that model.
That's why technology like watermarking doesn't work and will never work. Implicitly it creates a minimum of a two-tiered society and no amount of "law" will change the technological reality of this.
Now the things they produce can be done in a fraction of the time without any of the stakes, nor any of the moral society-integrating foundational encoding.
Instead, a single billionaire with an army of GPUs can ask for a thing, and that thing will be produced near instantaneously.
The old way of regulating depended on PEOPLE creating things at PEOPLE speeds in order for the laws to work. That simply is not the case any more.