So they have modified their policy because they do not understand either copyright law in general or Thaler vs. Perlmutter in particular.
I think we will be seeing a lot more of this. There were plenty of examples of developers failing to understand copyright law and the implications of licenses before LLMs and that was with well established law. With some genuine uncertainty around LLMs, more variation between jurisdictions and some criteria that are less clear its going to get a lot worse.
Public domain works incorporated into a copyrighted work result in a copyrighted work. And that case didn't determine Thaler could not have claimed authorship, only that because he didn't, his application was correctly denied.
I think we will be seeing a lot more of this. There were plenty of examples of developers failing to understand copyright law and the implications of licenses before LLMs and that was with well established law. With some genuine uncertainty around LLMs, more variation between jurisdictions and some criteria that are less clear its going to get a lot worse.