You're looking at the data wrong. It's 12% of people who have ever responded to spam, not 12% of all spam that was responded to.
Still, I suspect the 12% figure they report is inaccurate.

Ever logged in to a computer connected to an LCD projector?

Here's my favorite video of a robot climbing stairs. Pay no attention to the robot behind the curtain.

The relevant court case (at least for US law, and possibly for UK law) is "Bridgeman v. Corel". Quoting WP:

Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp., 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y. 1999), was a decision by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, which ruled that exact photographic copies of public domain images could not be protected by copyright because the copies lack originality. Even if accurate reproductions require a great deal of skill, experience and effort, the key element for copyrightability under U.S. law is that copyrighted material must show sufficient originality.

Remember that their plans for the 1.0 release was for a stable API for language implementors, not highly optimized performance.

Actually, R is a real (Turing-complete) programming language like Perl, Python, Ruby, etc. It just happens to have lots of statistical libraries and matrix-oriented functions.
You put #!/usr/bin/Rscript in your first line and it can work just like any other scripting language, with command-line arguments, etc. I use it all the time as a replacement for other scripting languages (think PDL+Perl or Numpy+Python).

R is an excellent language for any scientist. The sytax and semantics of the language are very well thought-out.