Jury in Oracle v. Google finds in Google's favour

That's not relevant to fair use analysis. What's relevant to fair use analysis is if Java's market would have been bigger if Google neither bought a license nor produced Android. Obviously, any unlicensed use of a copyright protected work is going to reduce the caller of the protected work compared to the exact same behavior coupled with paying for a license, but that's not what the market effect factor is about.

> It is right that the author of a creative work get protection for having conceived that work and reduced it to tangible form.

This is incorrect (and I didn't grow up in the digital age, unless you call 4 function calculators the "digital age"). There is no such right. It is not a human right, nor is it something that you are intrinsically entitled to have.

Copyright is something that is endowed upon you by the government. It is intrinsically owned by society. You are granted a limited monopoly on copying. If society did not grant you this monopoly, you would not have it. This is how it has worked historically and this is how it is written in law currently.

The problem that you may be facing is the "right" in "copyright". It is an overloaded term. It refers to your legal ability rather than your moral entitlement.

Because copyright is not an intrinsic right, but rather a societal grant, it is important that we weigh the societal benefits of this grant. In my opinion, in this case the ability to receive a copyright for an API is counter to the intent of copyright. For example, why can we not copyright recipes or game rules or fashion designs? I won't rehash 100 years of legal debate on the subject, but rather give my opinion that similar criteria should be applied here.

Sure, you can make arbitrary restrictions for how to distribute a work in a license.

The question at hand is whether you can impose these restrictions in the viral fashion of the GPL, e.g., on code I write that merely makes use of your APIs.

The way that the GPL attempts to enforce this is with copyright law, by not granting you the right to redistribute GPLed software unless you comply with it. By design, it doesn't restrict anything else about how you use the software.

> Likewise, the quality of work produced with the economic incentive of copyright tends to be better, often much better, than what is produced based on other funding models or a voluntary basis... (Some people may disagree, but I consider this point so obvious by now that it's rarely worth engaging on.)

Sorry you find this tiresome. The history of popular and culturally relevant music can be seen as basically a history of uncompensated outsider art becoming coopted and repackaged into dull derivatives.

You may find, for example, Elvis clearly superior to the mostly uncompensated African American traditions he pulled from, but that's hardly a position so universal as to be obvious.

I know you caveated with especially things people don't do for fun, but basically all art attracts people doing it for art's sake.

> That seems like decent evidence that no-one has found a reliably better way to incentivize creating and distributing new works so far

The overwhelming majority of artists will never see any return for their works. There is such a long tail of garage bands making music for fun that it's hard to imagine the need for financial incentives to encourage greater saturation of that industry.

Financial incentives don't encourage great art, they only incentivize commercial art. There are overlaps, but we can't pretend those are both the same thing.

It seems to me that many of your examples are more symptoms of today's often absurd implementations, rather than the basic idea of copyright itself.

As I argued in another post, I don't think copyright should ever become an artificial tool to limit communication or interoperability, and as such work necessary to that purpose should indeed not be subject to copyright. It already isn't, to varying degrees, in various jurisdictions.

False takedown claims and the problems that result are more a symptom of allowing centralised hosting of content than anything else. YouTube and the like have no obligation to continue hosting anyone's content if it causes them trouble, regardless of the legitimacy or otherwise of any complaints. As long as there are also no real penalties in law for malicious or negligent actions by big rightsholders, you're going to get this sort of problem anyway.

There are already supposed to be provisions, under banners like fair use or fair dealing, for various applications of works that don't prejudice the original intent of the copyright. Here again it's clear that regulatory capture is hard at work undermining the system, but likewise here again that's due to weak political leadership rather than an inherent problem with copyright.

The areas you mentioned where I'm not so sure are things like remixes, fan works, and mods. In many cases these derivative works do depend on the original creative assets for most of their value, and as such perhaps they should not be exempt from the normal copyright provisions.

In short, I don't see any of those as particularly compelling examples against the basic idea of copyright as a temporary monopoly on reproduction of creative works, subject to reasonable limitations of scope. Rather, I think they are compelling examples of how badly copyright laws have been captured and distorted over time by powerful special interests, particularly in the US, and to some extent of the dangers of giving up control of our own content to third party hosting or distribution services with their own priorities that don't necessarily match our own.