As weird as it may seem, you should not forget that free software licenses are built upon the fabric of copyright. Without copyright, free software could not exist in its current form.
For GPL-like "copyleft" licenses, there would be no way to enforce that binary distributions of derived works are accompanied by their source code. Similarly, in the context of permissive BSD/MIT-style licenses, there would be no way to enforce attribution.
So, given that FOSS---which a large portion of the HN crowd depends on---cannot work without copyright (at least not in its current form), the recent discussions may be less of a surprise.
So, given that FOSS---which a large portion of the HN crowd depends on---cannot work without copyright (at least not in its current form), the recent discussions may be less of a surprise.