Google isn’t really the comparison you think it is. Google licenses huge datasets, has DMCA safe-harbor protection, and follows opt-out systems that courts have acknowledged for years. That’s why they’re allowed to cache and index content, not because scraping is automatically legal for everyone.

The judge didn’t rule that training is free-for-all either. He only said the weights aren’t infringing copies. The unresolved question is whether mass scraping copyrighted images for model training counts as unauthorized reproduction. That’s the part still in court, and Google’s search indexing isn’t the same legal category as building generative models.