In my experience, most people underestimate what's negotiable across the board. Especially those making enough to do most of their business with mass-market operations, like big-box stores and retail service providers, that profit by doing many, many standardized transactions every day, with minimal discretion or even personal involvement.

Below that, lots of haggling and informal trade often help people get by. The costs of that process can be another burden on the poor. At the high end, it's worth involving people with discretion on the sell side. Additionally, sales are often one-off and customized. They may also bundle a bunch of different items and benefits without clear line-item breakdowns.

When hiring a lawyer, I'd nearly always recommend getting terms down in a written and signed engagement letter before work starts. That is very much a negotiation, but it's fine to ask questions and comparison shop.

If you're starting with a call, it's perfectly normal to start by asking whether initial consultation will be billed or not. If it will be, ask the rate. If it won't be, expect some limits on what can be discussed. The best lawyers I know aren't cheap or easily tricked into giving free advice on consultation calls with speedrunners, but they are up-front about what they charge for and how.

Disclosure: Am lawyer. Negotiate professionally.

Copyright under US law does not require "artistic expression". One of the requirements is called "creativity", but it's very easy to meet. The key phrase is literally "some minimal degree of creativity".

The fundamental policy choice was to protect computer software under intellectual property law, with exclusive rights and market compensation. There were a number of ways that could have been done. Other jurisdictions toyed with new, software-specific laws. But in the end the call in the US was to bring it under existing copyright law with some tweaks to definitions and a small handful of software-specific rules.

Good question. They have a new Juki machine to sew these on directly, but I can't tell whether it will be practical to sew on by hand. I expect most tailor and seamstress shops won't be taking our loans to buy machines just to sew these new zippers in one size.

You've given the argument from fallacy, dismissing an argument without any reference to its content, but only to its conclusion. The existence of bad arguments for a proposition doesn't condemn all other arguments for the same.

The question is whether any particular argument's strong or weak. That's a matter of evidence and reasoning.

Art versus engineering is a very dangerous generalization of the law. There is a creativity requirement for copyrightability, but it's an explicitly low bar. Search query "minimal degree of creativity".

The Supreme Court decision in Oracle v Google skipped over copyrightability and addressed fair use. Fair use is a legal defense, applying only in response to finding infringement, which can only be found if material's copyrightable. So the way the Supreme Court made its decision was weird, but it wasn't about the creativity requirement.