Legacy Categories as Bottlenecks: Copyright Fair Use and 1980s Ultralight Rules Both Gatekeep New Physical-Digital Systems

The Anthropic $1.5 Billion Copyright Suit settlement and the FAA's Part 103 enforcement against YiVTOL battery weight and control modes both turn on the same mechanism: pre-2010 legal buckets (fair-use precedents for text and 1980s ultralight weight/control definitions) are applied unchanged to systems whose core properties—massive parallel data ingestion and electric distributed propulsion—did not exist when the buckets were written. The same pattern appears in the METR report on Anthropic's doubled capability rate and the Tau Robotics remote-piloted cleaning deployments: once the regulatory classification is fixed, scaling the new artifact inside the old box becomes the binding constraint rather than raw technical performance. No single desk covered both the book-piracy settlement and the eVTOL ruling as instances of the identical classification failure.