One of the supposed justifications for the intellectual monopoly called copyright is that it drives creativity and culture. In the last few weeks alone we have had multiple demonstrations of why the opposite is true: copyright destroys culture, and not by accident, but wilfully. For example, the MTVNews.com site, along with its sister site CMT.com, …
The notion that every person has to somehow protect their works for all of their life and beyond the grave is obviously dumb and purely favors corporations at the cost of pitting artists against themselves and fans.
Let’s not forget that copyright enforcement is mostly funded by taxpayers. It’s a collectively massive cost to the rest of us.
It probably made sense for a limited time when we (society) were getting something of comparable value (cultural works) in return. But now that it’s effectively endless, and dominated by corporations, it looks an awful lot like systematic extraction of wealth… from us.