Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that violating copyright is defined as stealing property under US law.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/part-I/chapter-11...
> Since the statutorily defined property rights of a copyright holder have a character distinct from the possessory interest of the owner of simple "goods, wares, [or] merchandise," interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The infringer of a copyright does not assume physical control over the copyright nor wholly deprive its owner of its use. Infringement implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_(19...
Trafficking in copyrighted works constitutes theft, but a private equity firm buying a company with debt, transferring the debt onto the company's balance sheet, allowing it to go into bankruptcy because of enormous debt load, and paying themselves huge bonuses along the way is not theft.
If it weren't for the fact that the U.S. federal code as it exists in June of 2020 is the definitive source of ethical and moral definitions, I would think that maybe something _untoward_ might be going on.
Your philosophical musings are not uninteresting, but they are irrelevant to the fact that freeing slaves legitimately bought is defined as stealing property under US law.
Unless you want to make the argument that a philosophical argument and a legal argument are equivalent (which I would actually be quite interested in seeing).