> People have certain rights, duties and prohibitions. Equating the right of George Lucas to use ideas he saw with rights of a machine to do that misses the point

Hardly relevant, given that the machine has no rights, so no one is equating those with anything. The point is that the machine is doing automated learning on behalf of the developers who are training it, so what should be decided is whether those very human people have a right to train their model in that way.