alt Hacker NewsIt's supposed to be arbitrary. Copyright is not some sort of human right or divine commandment that creators have. It's a legal device to incentivize a certain type of behavior. Like tax cuts and subsidies, governments can dangle it in front of people whenever it wants.
Monkeys and LLMs (so far) either don't understand or don't need such incentives, so they don't get copyright.
All law, in fact, is arbitrary.
I've come to understand that rules are not executable, or not executed. As programmers we understand if we write if(X) {Y} and X happens, Y will.
Laws aren't like that. Laws are just powerful people telling us what we want to do and what they want to do to us if we don't. The difference is subtle: the powerful person's power is not limited by the law. He only writes the law because exercising his power is annoying and he'd prefer that we complied in advance so he doesn't have to. The thing that actually executes is the powerful person's desires, not the law.