You completely missed the point of my comment. The commenter was claiming that unless you can recover data "verbatim" an encoding cannot be considered compress

You completely missed the point of my comment. The commenter was claiming that unless you can recover data "verbatim" an encoding cannot be considered compression. My example was to illustrate the silliness of that point, not to draw a straight line comparison between model weights and a lossy image compression format. As for legislation, I completely agree with you. There's real danger that, absent that, you'll just end up with legislation from the bench where judges attempt to shoehorn these issues into existing legal frameworks, and I suspect no one will be satisfied with the outcome.