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Anything can theoretically be trademarked, as long as it meets the requirements. Rather, if you are, without permission, using as a mark something that someone else owns a copyright in, then you would presumably be liable for copyright infringement every time you used it. The USPTO would in most cases have no reason to know whether your trademark registration included unlicensed copyrighted elements; this is a fight the copyright holder would have to raise on their own. Depending on how derivative the trademark ultimately was, the copyright holder would in most cases have no idea any infringement had occurred (minus some whistleblower getting involved).
Statutory licenses are already the legal standard for music recordings and broadcast-to-cable television programming (see table on page 38 of this PDF). When tech innovators clash with content industries, a historical answer has been for Congress to impose a compulsory licensing scheme. I agree that $0.01 per image might be too little, but surely $1.00 per image would be prohibitively high in most cases of model development. The thing is, deciding the right price is something that can be handed to a bureaucracy to determine. The problem right now is that, as far as I can tell, all image models are just straight-up mass infringement. It's Google's "library of Alexandria" all over again, with technological innovation and the letter of the law coming into direct conflict. And it's not at all clear who will win, or what it will cost the rest of us.
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