Am I the only one believing that copyright has long outlived its usefulness? After all, copyright is not some natural law or mathematical consequence, but rather a social convention that made sense in the era of the printing press.
As an author, I do want the stories I write and worlds I build to be protected for a reasonable period. Right now, copyright is a significant discouragement to any other entities from taking a story I wrote and claiming it as their own and preventing me from ever growing an audience for my work. It’s far from perfect, and I can’t afford litigation, but it enshrines a cultural value of allowing people to create things…
I agree I’d like a world full of great art, and a decent fraction of human energy put into art-making seems good.
I grant that copyright plus free markets is one decent way of achieving this.
Now that I try to elaborate the downsides of copyright I fail, other than to say I want to keep legal barriers in the digital realm to an absolute minimum, so as to speed progress.
When I was younger I thought that great art was made by either starving artists or artists with wealthy patrons, but I guess much of the art I enjoy is made by professional artists participating in the copyright economy.
So I suppose agree, though I’d like to see more public dialog analyzing the issue, considering modifications (like you propose in another comment) or alternatives (such as public funding for the arts, tax breaks for patrons, etc.).
(I guess I let my contempt for the patent system bleed into my thinking on copyright.)