> That's some bizarre logic: copyright predates the existence of scientific papers

Firstly, this isn’t true, but more importantly it doesn’t matter because the parent’s claim doesn’t depend on scientific papers predating copyright.

The first scientific paper was Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, published in London on March 6, 1665 (or you can go back as far as Aristotle if you prefer). The first copyright law is England’s Statute of Anne (1710).