My guess is that some idealistic bright young thing at WSJ said "We should let people submit stuff to us anonymously" and envisioned it as a simple file upload

My guess is that some idealistic bright young thing at WSJ said "We should let people submit stuff to us anonymously" and envisioned it as a simple file upload with a submit button. And because laws exist and lawyers at big companies (and small ones) tell you whether to use one square of toilet paper or two, they said "you must add this copyright thing or it's not gonna fly". And the idealistic bright young thing thought "That's not quite as cool as an anonymous document dump, but it's a document dump... I guess". Then the internet (the market?) told the WSJ, we do not agree to your lawyers' terms and conditions and another good idea was defeated. Big corp: you can't remove the core values from a product and expect the idiots will flock to it because you are Big corp and should be taken seriously.