I can't help but feeling like if we're just going to be talking about copyright, we've jumped the shark.

He's not. He's pointing out that the laws of a society exist because that society believes they need them to order their social interactions. The earliest evidence of such a full legal framework is the Code of Hammurabi. He's not making your point. Copyright is a legal question because modern societies believe creative works deserve some kind of legal protection. You need not agree, but you can't ignore the question when working with someone else's implementation of ideas without potential consequence. Understandably OpenBSD wishes to avoid those legal consequences if at all possible. Wishes for utopias without lawyers and legal code are wishful thinking and irrelevant to the present.