> I do think this nicely embodies the difficulty of dealing with IP vs. actual, tangible things, though. With the car or bridge analogs, copyright would not prevent anyone from replicating them, but it would be patents and trademarks that put restrictions on how and what can be reproduced, instead of the much stronger restrictions of copyright on software.
Photographs of artwork such as paintings or statues are routinely seen to be infringements of the original work. So it is not unique to software. There are lots of demarcations and corner cases for this... for example, if you install your statue in public, you no longer have grounds to sue people for photographing it. If the statue is a minor part of a photograph, then it's not infringement.
Same applies to software. This is well-tread ground, by this point. People have been reverse engineering and copying software for a long time.
> Now, a binary has elements of literal nature that copyright protects, but a decompilation results in a completely different information stream, so that seems like a non issue.
Copyright protects original works of authorship. There is nothing in copyright law that talks about something's "literal nature" or different "information streams". For example, if I write a song, I am still the author of the song even when that song is performed--even though that requires a significant amount of interpretation, transformation, and creativity on the part of the musicians. I am still the author.
Likewise, if I write a book about a character named Jean-Luc Picard, who is the bald captain of a captain of a spaceship in my made-up universe, Paramount has grounds to sue for copyright infringement.
Copyright law talks mostly about very ordinary terms like authorship. Authorship survives all sorts of transformations... not infinitely so, but neither decompilation nor refactoring will change who the author of a program is.