I think in this regard it works just fine. If the laws move to say that "learning from data" while not reproducing it is "stealing", then yes, you reading others code and learning from it is also stealing.
If I can't feed a news article into a classifier to teach it to learn whether or not that I would like that article that's not a world I want to live in. And yes it's exactly the same thing as what you are accusing LLMs of.
They should be subject to laws the same way humans are. If they substantially reproduce code they had access to then it's a copyright violation. Just like it would be for a human doing the same. But highly derived code is not "stolen" code, neither for AI nor for humans.
Me teaching my brain someone’s way of syntactically expressing procedures is analogous to AI developers teaching their model that same mode of expression.
