> The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

It's only exhausting if you think copyright ever reasonably settled the matter of ownership of knowledge and want to morally justify an incoherent set of outcomes that they personally favor. In practice it's primarily been a tool for the powerful party in any dispute to hammer others for disrupting their business model. I think that's pretty much the only way attempting to apply ownership semantics to knowledge or information can end up.