You are right that, when applied to actual copyrighted materials, the only obvious options are A: "We'll voluntarily submit to the legal fiction that bits have color (or at least shades of gray) in the form of copyright law, because we can see some benefit to doing so," and B: "We believe that a society whose rules can be fully justified by concrete logic, evolutionary morality, and the laws of physics is preferable to a society founded upon legal fictions, and abolition of the concept of intellectual property follows from this."
However, I believe a good number of people hold position C: "We believe copyright law has significantly overstepped its useful bounds, and will pretend to hold position B in order to achieve a reasonable compromise."
If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. -Thomas Jefferson
Ideas are fundamentally different from bicycles. One cannot share a bicycle indefinitely without each user having proportionally less access. One can share bits and ideas. Show me where in silicon the color of a bit is stored. The entire concept of colorful bits is a fabricatiion of the human imagination, not a fundamental property of the universe. The atoms comprising a bicycle, on the other hand, can indeed be under the control of the atoms comprising a human being, to the physical exclusion of others.
I'm sure we both understand well enough the trade-offs that society makes in granting copyrights. Reasonable people have differing opinions, but these trade-offs existed long before computers, which have only shifted the balance of the bargain. The fact that bits encode information as numbers is irrelevant to the discussion.
I don't think option A is coherent. In fact most use of the phrase "illegal number" is by people who are attempting a reductio ad absurdum argument against the legal system (but don't understand color). But note that as a practical matter, we do have protected numbers. Good luck convincing a court that you produced an identical text to the last Harry Potter novel through any means other than copying.
Option B, the anarchistic approach, is no doubt consistent but would be a radical change from our present form of copyright.