I believe in Freedom of Information.

you're stealing when you make an unauthorized copy of something

Let's simplify the system. (1) I have a thought no one has yet purchased. Say, "apple green puppies." (2) I pay money to the government, to be given "ownership" of my thought. (3) Any time anyone else reads, or writes, or says "apple green puppies," independently or not, I claim they have stolen from me. What? Seriously?

Every argument that the side against copyright has seems to be perpetually bogged down in definitions and assumptions and challenging paradigms.

My argument isn't. My argument is simple: you can't own an idea. The concept of owning information is Marxist to the extreme, telling people what they can think or read. Thoughts, ideas, and information are not and cannot naturally be property. The artificial construction of information ownership is morally bankrupt and practically catastrophic to technological progress. The cost of patents holding back scientific progress for the entire world far exceeds the gain of corporations developing intellectual property.

Thomas Jefferson has good thoughts on the ownership of information. From his letter to McPherson:

It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility.

Considering the exclusive right to invention as given not of natural right, but for the benefit of society, I know well the difficulty of drawing a line

Ultimately, Jefferson concluded that patents and copyrights were a necessary evil. Patents were originally limited to 4 years, and copyright to 14. Then the wealthy bought laws extending patents to 17 years, and copyright to effectively eternity.

Again, I think all information should be free. All information can be mathematically reduced to a number. Then, information ownership is equivalent to owning numbers. When you reduce it thusly, the idea that someone can own a number is even more bewildering.

Information ownership is a relatively new idea. Until the Statue of Anne in 1710, the world basically didn't have the concept. I feel like society accepts it because we've lived with it all our lives. It feels natural. But it isn't. And I think when one examines the concept and really thinks about the implications, it's madness.

I say this as someone currently making their living from sold information (software). But I firmly believe our economy could and would adapt to free laws. For example, live concerts, theatres, and software support services.

That said, I am willing to concede Jefferson's conclusion. I think 4-year patents and 14-year copyrights would (and did) permit information profits without excessively harming scientific progress.