[presspot]

The stated purpose of copyright law is to promote the Progress of Science and the Arts.

Congress decided to grant limited "rights" to copyright holders as incentives for them create, not to protect their work forever, but in exchange for it to be widely available and eventually in the public domain.

That these incentives take the form of limited protections is a side effect. That the original purpose is often corrupted and delivered ham-handedly has more to do with politics than purpose.

If we argued from first principles, we could invent a better system, but that system would undoubtedly allow for ingestion and manipulation by AI.