Copyright, and patents, are not based on moral principles. It's a temporary government license meant to encourage innovation and hustle. Whether it works or not, I don't know. But the only question of morality is if it's immoral to break an arbitrary law, or not.

>And what a shame that is.

I was with you until this. Copyright is a legal fiction, if it's no longer working the world will adapt. No need for shame to be involved.

It's worth noting that the moral background (at least in terms of political philosophy in the US) was always rooted in practicalities. The Constitution even includes the qualifier "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts." The moment a protection works against those goals, it's on shaky ground. And that ground is always in flux; there's a reason Thomas Jefferson noted regarding patents that "other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrasment than advantage to society."

This is why copyright is shot-through with exceptions (for example, we give broad leeway to infringement for educational purposes, for what benefit does society gain if protection of the intellectual property of this generation stunts the growth of creative faculties of the next?). And that's usually fine, until, say, a broadly-exceptioned process to gather and catalog art and expression worldwide available online that was fed into neural net training in academic settings for decades becomes something of a different moral quality when the only thing that's changed is instead of a grey-bearded professor overseeing the machine it's a grey-templed billionaire financier.

(I submit to the Grand Council of People Reading This Thread the possibility that one resolution to this apparent paradox is to consider that the actual moral stance is "It's not fair that someone might starve after working hard on a product of the mind while others benefit from their hard work," and that perhaps copyright is simply not the best tool to address that moral concern).

Blame the current wave of rentier capitalism. Pioneered by SaaS. The funds like the one behind this site played a role in the acceleration.