1984 was published in 1949. GNU and the FSF are contemporary with Neuromancer. The BSD license predates the GPL and the idea of copyleft by several years. It takes a village to raise a child.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses the 4-clause (GPL incompatible) BSD license was 1988, 3-clause (the one everyone uses now) was 1990. It got rid of the advertising clause at RMS's behest. RMS spent a long time wrangling for that change.
GPL1 was 1989. I'm not sure if RMS was involved with BSD3. The MIT license as used in MIT Athena and X windows was somewhat earlier, like 1986, and is similar to BSD3.
GNU Emacs as released around 1984 had its own license similar to GPL1, called the Emacs General Public License (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft). The term "copyleft" per that article originated in 1984 or 1985.
I semi-remember that GPL1 was mostly ported from the Emacs GPL, basically substituting "The Program" for "Emacs". I don't remember if the Emacs GPL used the term "Copyleft".
The informal distribution terms for PDP-10 Emacs in the 1970's were an antecedent of copyleft that RMS called the "Emacs Commune". Distribute freely but you were (informally) required to send in changes and improvements. See: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Free_as_in_Freedom_(2002)/Cha... The GPL's were somewhat a codification of the Emacs Commune.
It wasn't like the MIT and BSD stuff happened with with RMS in a state of ignorance either. He obviously wasn't in control of anything outside the GNU project, but he was involved in lots of discussions with MIT and Berkeley about licensing and other issues.
That was sort of complicated and I'm not sure whether the BSD4 license development was related. It's possible (I don't know) that BSD4 was developed for some other reason like the VLSI tools Berkeley was releasing at the time.
Regarding BSD itself, there was a lawsuit between AT&T (or some successor) and UC, that was settled by UC having to delete some files from the BSD distro but then being off the hook with regard to the rest. That made it possible to freely distribute the BSD distro. The BSD distro existed long before the lawsuit, but you originally had to be a Unix licensee to get it. Then I think Berkeley tried to get rid of the AT&T files and release the rest under BSD4 but there was still some FUD. They got sued and in the settlement they agreed to delete a few more files, which removed any remaining legal clouds.
Fwiw the legal doubts about BSD during that period (pre-settlement) are basically why the Linux kernel became popular despite being far less mature than the BSD kernel at the time. People were afraid to run BSD because of the potential for AT&T lawsuits. The basic Unix userspace utilities were presumably long gone since they were full of AT&T code, but the GNU counterparts mostly existed by then.
I don't think the specifics matter much by now, but I didn't like the misstated history that I responded to.
In the broad strokes, the inaccuracy is to suggest that nobody besides the FSF and RMS were converging to many of the same conclusions at the same time. The FSF did a good job of tying their ideas to a ratchet (GPL and copyright assignment) that would continue to pull in influence. That influence and recognition did not bring any benefit to open source (one of their childish "can't words"). Instead, it merely brought donations into the FSF and starved oxygen from a generation of others.
