I don't think that's quite right. They can prohibit your use of the program unless you agree to and follow the rules they establish. They are able to do that prohibition using copyright, but isn't it proof that copyright doesn't necessarily do that the fact that there are other very different licenses?

Copyright, by default, is not at all permissive. Every license (including viral ones) are more permissive than the legal default standing, not less.

This is why one company I worked for refused to let us use Webpack 1.x- a dependency of a dependency was an ancient npm module from the time that adding licenses to modules wasn't very common. It wasnt until the 2.x line came out that they finally updated to a version that updated to a version that didn't have that problem.

I see.

Yet my comparison of the human brain still stands, I believe.

Just because you learned about something in art class from looking at a copyrighted work doesn’t make everything you produce after that a derivative work.