Did you know it's actually illegal to photocopy books you check out from the library? It's an illegal copy.
That aside, the analogies between humans and ML models fall apart when you actually get into the details, which is why AI companies don't want that.
Human brains don't have RAM and Disk storage that keep direct copies of works. Computers do. Human brains are not entirely deterministic calculators. Computers are.
If you have all the state data of an AI model, you can know exactly what it will produce, and the input data is a necessary component of that state data, so it's not transformative in the same way as a human brain in the first place.
2 humans will not create the exact same output given a shared starting state in the way that 2 computers (AI models included) will.
The only reason people falsely believe AI models are different is because no one actually traces through that state data, and there are enough pseudo-random variables involved and state-changes that they create the illusion of non-determinism, but that is, in point of fact, an illusion.
But some LLMs seem to be able to quote on demand from a wide range of literature; these models evidently do have some kind of memory, even if it's been distilled and blended and distilled again.
> By analyzing large corpora (which necessarily involves first making copies of the data to be analyzed
Whether they retain that later is immaterial to whether copyright infringement occurred. Deleting a movie you illegally downloaded after you watch (train on) it doesn't make it legal.
If I break into the court house to let my child see the artwork in the public areas, the issue isn't whether my child can see, learn from, and copy the style of the artwork. The issue is that I broke into the court house instead of going in the front door when it was open to the public.