All laws are arbitrary. But the story of how we got them is meaningful.
Copyright exists to encourage more copyable stuff to be made (pg has a good essay on this topic, where he observes history shows the opposite of a copyright regime isn't openness... It's guilds and secrecy cults). What Google does (interpreting the data that scans to help you find references to searches) is considered either transformative work, or recitation of fact. Copyright does not prevent somebody from doing those things because those things make works discoverable, which encourages people to make more stuff.
> Copyright exists to encourage more copyable stuff to be made
This is a backward legitimization attempt. Copyright was made because editors, authors and composers lobbied to get a monopoly on their creations and derivative work. As a matter of fact, copyright was continuously expanded on requests from rent-seeking copyright holders (which, in the overwhelming majority of case, aren't creators of any kind).
Not if you believe Jefferson's thoughts on the topic.
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society... Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [ideas], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices." ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813
The goal was to encourage innovation. I don't disagree at all that the goal was regulatory-captured in a significant way by rentiers, but its purpose is, counterintuitively, to incentivize pushing ideas out into the light.
This is a good illustration of what I call a “backward legitimization attempt”: you quote a letter that comes from ONE CENTURY after copyright was introduced.
And by the way, the Statute of Anne, was actually introduced as a way to end publisher's monopoly and create the public domain after a short period (14 years), how ironic.
Copyright exists to encourage more copyable stuff to be made (pg has a good essay on this topic, where he observes history shows the opposite of a copyright regime isn't openness... It's guilds and secrecy cults). What Google does (interpreting the data that scans to help you find references to searches) is considered either transformative work, or recitation of fact. Copyright does not prevent somebody from doing those things because those things make works discoverable, which encourages people to make more stuff.