So yeah, I would say something else was happening in that story. The students had an intuitive or innate sense of what was ethical here and couldn’t articulate it against the well-honed apologia created to support an unethical system.

Intellectual property is a crime against humanity. It takes a universal innate quality of sensing thinking beings and then wraps it in violence saying that we will literally use the force of violence if we have to in order to punish you acting on natural process that are prosocial and help humanity.

The only reason intellectual property needs to exist in the first place is because we proactively starve the masses and then set up a system where they can only survive is they make the rich and powerful more rich and powerful.

The students in the class intuitively understood that a human being doing work and then benefitting from that work is far more ethical than a human being doing work and then being forced by law to never ever benefit from that work again simply because that person was starving and agreeing to that abusive contract was the only way they could get their next meal.