I think your issue is believing that Imaginary Property rights exist at all (especially since you’re basically advocating for software patents with this: “ It may have no lines of code in common with Illustrator, but everything it has was taken from code that someone wrote.”). Heck, how is a human supposed to learn in your view then?
Why is the argument "well it's fine when a human does it". It's not a human, or a living being, or even concious. It's software operating in our social plane (language) owned by a bunch of yahoos in the bay. They are lining their pockets reselling ideas from books they burned..not sure they should be given the same grace a lone individual reading Adobe's source code line by line.
There are licenses which allow you to use open-source work, with attribution.
There’s a reason why so many concepts in the sciences are named after somebody. Usually it’s the discoverer.
I’ve got no idea what this implies about learning for humanity as whole, though.
> Heck, how is a human supposed to learn in your view then?
In your view then, it would be entirely legal for me to torrent all the movies in the world as long as I say it's "to learn"?