Consider if you took two copyrighted pictures and combined them in some way in photoshop. We can lay claim to the combined work, but we may not have consent of the original authors works to distribute thier work.

Now consider if you trained the NNet with the same two images, such that it was highly overtrained and basically produced a combined replica of the inputs. This is essentially the same as doing it manually in photoshop. That a computer done it does not take ownership away from the creators of the two images.

A NNet isn't trained with two images though, but millions. Do we abandon copyright because of scale? Should the NNet operator not be required to keep the entire training set such that copyright can be traced? Do we invent an entire new industry on determining the probability that a particular image was used to train a NNet (and by how much it affected it), such that it's owner can claim royalties on anything the NNet produces?

The question isn't about google versus operator, it's about whether or not we're going to continue investing in the madness of copyright for machines designed to mimic human brains, and if so when will it apply to ourselves - for we can't archive our own training set.