The powers that be have done a great job convincing the layperson that copyright is about protecting artists and not publishers. It’s historically inaccurate and you can discover that copyright law was pushed by publishers who did not want authors keeping second hand manuscripts of works they sold to publishing companies.

Additional reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne

Exactly. IP isn’t rivalrous like land or goods, so it has no place being artificially restricted. Property rights are a solution to human conflict in the natural world.

It certainly does feel like it. I wonder how ads were inserted into the results and not marked as such.