The key problem is that copyright infringement by a private individual is regarded by the court as something so serious that it negates the right to privacy. It’s a sign of the twisted values that copyright has succeeded on imposing on many legal systems. It equates the mere copying of a digital file with serious crimes that merit a prison sentence, an evident absurdity.
This is a good example of how copyright’s continuing obsession with ownership and control of digital material is warping the entire legal system in the EU. What was supposed to be simply a fair way of rewarding creators has resulted in a monstrous system of routine government surveillance carried out on hundreds of millions of innocent people just in case they copy a digital file.
The background is that French law requires ISPs to retain the IPs of their customer for some time. That way, an IP address can be associated with a customer.
A CEO is an employee. You generally can’t sue employees for this sort of thing. It may be possible to sue the company as a whole for enabling the copyright infringement, but that’s not to do with this case. Perhaps in the future, operators of WiFi-hotspots will be required to use something like Youtube’s Content ID system.
They can use this to go after “pirates”. It’s got nothing to do with AI.
Machine learning steals copyrighted material from artists and authors. Those servers have IP addresses too.
Why is a company allowed to track people from taking pirating their copyrighted content, but artists aren’t allowed to do the same to companies making a profit off their work?
Artists are allowed to do the exact same thing. That’s probably not a helpful answer, but it’s the correct answer to your question. You’re making some wrong assumptions about the law, and probably about the economics, as well. Writing a proper explanation would take me quite a while and I’m not sure if it would be appreciated.
There are some companies, EG Adobe and Shutterstock, that offer “commercially safe” image generators trained on licensed images. Artists who would like to make money by licensing images for AI training can deal with them.
Pretty sure getty has stolen publically licenced cc0 images off of Wikipedia and have even started going after the original authors of these images and people using the images even though getting stole them in the first place if I’m remembering my company controversies correctly in relation to stock companies