@ube @snacks It would have been illegal to copy Unix's implementation of cp (it was also garbage code that contained arbitrary limitations).

GNU wrote a replacement from scratch, but kept the same name so that people who used the Unix cp command before didn't need to needlessly learn a new name.

A typical name, let along all of 2 characters is not creative and therefore cannot be copyrighted.

It's a free system and therefore you can alias a preferred name if you prefer another name.