I know with trademarks, the law puts a perverse incentive on businesses to ruthlessly attack uses of their trademark. If they allow even innocuous uses of it, then they risk the trademark becoming generic and losing all rights over it [1].
I wonder if a similar perverse incentive and emergent behavior is in play here where record labels worry that any encroachment on fair use could set a precedent that will come back to bite them.
It's really a quite different set of law because the whole point of a trademark is that it uniquely identifies a particular seller so that buyers can distinguish it from others in the market. If that identification weakens then your trademark becomes meaningless and can no longer be enforced. But that logic doesn't apply to copyright.
Trademark is completely unrelated to copyright. You do not have an obligation to pursue every copyright infringement the same way you do for trademarks.
I wonder if a similar perverse incentive and emergent behavior is in play here where record labels worry that any encroachment on fair use could set a precedent that will come back to bite them.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_trademark