And sounds like a great way to plead guilty to a lesser crime, but IANAL.

It is enough to say absolutely nothing, and request the government to prove its case.

If someone shot a person with my gun, I would invoke the fifth amendment, and ask the government to prove who did it beyond a reasonable doubt.

And Russell Vought is holding the weapon.

If you write a contract and give it to a lawyer with the instruction, "Anyone who satisfies this contract gets this money." And someone satisfies the contract to the lawyer's -but not your- satisfaction, and the lawyer sends the money, did the third party steal from you?

I do this of my own free will, at my own hazard. I know I'm playing this game. I have intentionally elected to use a system that will execute without any further intervention or oversight on my part. Verbally, I state that I am confident enough in the writing of my instruction that I feel secure in whatever outcome it may bring.

The system automatically executes and someone has sold me a very nice remote control car.

I sue that person.

Why should I have standing?

You could count the words in a book and publish the word count, and while the information is based on the contents of the book, that would fall incredibly short of being a derivative work.

I suspect they committed whatever copyright violation is committed when they downloaded the copyrighted works. Training an AI on them is simply not related to the protections that copyright offers.

Some folks just can't imagine buying what some folks are selling.

https://electricliterature.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tr...

Given the fact that images are transmitted to a person in a manner that doesn't violate copyright (and even if they are, the transmitter, not receiver is guilty of infringement), training an AI is not something that copyright law limits.

The AI weights that result are about the farthest thing from a derivative work, as the weights as a separate object, don't seem to contain the slightest remnant of the original work.

As far as I can tell, the image you describe and your example sentence are closer than you might think to each other. Mickey Mouse is a copyrighted character, and Disney could certainly claim infringement for both. Whether you have a fair use claim is down to the tenets of fair use, and whether they sue you is down to their estimation of how likely it is it'd be profitable for them to do so.

So what is fair use? https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107

Put simply, you have to argue about it in court and decide on a case by case basis, but the factors are:

The nature of use, such as for profit vs. non-profit.

The nature of the copyrighted work. Your art might be considere literary criticism. How central to that message is Mickey Mouse?

The amount and substantiality of the copyrighted work appearing in your work. Mickey Mouse is the sole feature, so large.

How likely is it that your Mickey Mouse creation will serve as a substitute for people consuming normal Mickey Mouse content?