I think the parent's point was that paying someone to copy and transfer bits of data from one computer to another is weird and impossible to fully control and enforce. Paying someone for the act of creation itself is reasonable. While the current system uses the former as a sort of proxy for the latter, that's not the only current system, and it comes with some really bad side-consequences, like ever-expanding copyright terms, corporations as gatekeepers to content (who often end up profiting far more than the actual creator), and DRM leading to forever-locked/disappearing creative works.