You could argue the law is in effect determined by what you can get away with. They could argue that what they did it’s industry standard and therefore reasonable. This is usual slap on a wrist, pay a fine, and force employees to watch some ethics videos territory. Perhaps some donations to local politicians directly or transitively via lawyers.

Consider if I ran a file upload site, someone uploads The Lion King, my software asks them if they have the right to give this to me to distribute, they say yes, I then distribute the upload to many other users who pay me for it. Honey is paid in a round about way but they are still paid.

There is a special holding out as an agent rule where if the uploader was in fact a Disney employee and stated that they acting on the behalf of Disney give you this right. That could get the distributor out of trouble a few times, but on an industrial scale the distributor would lose reasonable tests which are the tests made at the civil court level.