The Supreme Court's refusal to hear Thaler v. Perlmutter is the structural fact the Google litigation now sits inside. By leaving the D.C. Circuit's human authorship requirement intact, the Court has established that AI-generated works carry no copyright protection regardless of the sophistication of the system that produced them. That ruling was decided before the Google training-data case reached its current phase — which means the labs cannot now pivot to claiming ownership of the outputs as a bargaining chip in settlement or liability negotiations. The only remaining argument is…