The reason the current license ecosystem exists for open-source software is that there's a huge difference between owning the code and owning the binary distrib

The reason the current license ecosystem exists for open-source software is that there's a huge difference between owning the code and owning the binary distribution. This difference doesn't exist for newspaper articles (or books, visual art, etc). Even technical manuals are not machines in the way that software is. The fact that software is both text and tool means the legal issues are different and need clarification. So existing copyright law was sufficient for written media, but didn't quite work for software. OTOH it seems that GPL-style copyleft licenses are being used more by writers and artists, so it's not like these issues exist in a vacuum. I expect copyleft will be more appealing to artists going forward given Midjourney et al.