I've dealt with copyright professionally and had my fair share of discussions with legal experts... It's definitely a rabbit hole, but it's not a rabbit hole you can readily dismiss and replace with something else. Working with copyrighted materials, copyright hampered us, but other times it backed us as well. It really is a double edged sword depending on where you come from...
So. I hope to give you a bit of an insight why it's not that easy...
At it's core, there are three reasons why copyright - or any law for that matter - is a hard problem:
First, describing a complex reality and codifying them in rules that govern society is a hard problem. Either the principles you derive from reality are too generic; or you end up with a law and volumes upon volumes of exceptions, clarifications, and so on. And in between, you always end up with people who feel that the law doesn't include them.
Secondly, there's the interpretation of the rules. That happens in court. And depending on the legal system that applies to you, this creates a precedent that may or may not be followed in general. Which is where you end up in the murkiness of legal traditions, customs and so on.
Thirdly, as a result, most people have a vague notion of what copyright is... but when you ask them to clarify and apply copyright law to specific cases, they tend have it wrong.
For instance:
> Every time a security camera picks up music, it's copyright infringement. When your camera records virtually anything man-made, copyright infringement.
No, it's not. Copyright doesn't prohibit you from making a copy. It prohibits you from publishing that copy: sharing with or distributing to other people.
You're perfectly good to make a recording or photo's with your smartphone, security camera, whatever. But as soon as you hit the "post" or "publish" button and you make your copy available for the wider world, that's copyright infringement.
> Probably 90% of photos are infringing copyright.
Depends who publishes them and whether they have permission from the original photographer to publish them. Or whether they are the original photographer themselves.
If you snap a picture and you publish that on Instagram, you are the original photographer and copyright automatically protects your rights. If some paper or magazine downloads that picture and publishes it on their website without your permission: you can send them an e-mail demanding to take that picture down. And they actually will have to comply with your demand less they want to risk you suing them.
If you make a picture of protected materials and you post that on line, well, now you are potentially infringing copyright. Like, if you go to MoMa and you do an Instagram of Andy Warhol. Technically, you published a copy of a creative work which is still under copyright. Or if you publish a 30 second sample from a Walt Disney's Snowwhite on Snapchat: same thing.
You could go "Oh! But Andy Warhol is dead and his art is in a museum, and Snowwhite is 80 years old, what's the harm? They are so well known!" You could argue: let's create exceptions for anything that hits a collection display of a museum; or is so well known that it's part of some implicit cultural canon which is foundational to society...
... but then you end up in a massive rabbit hole: how do you establish equal and fair criteria that say "this creative work is protected by copyright; and this isn't?" Which inevitably leads to endless yak shaving and bike shedding discussions (Yes, I've been there professionally. These are unwinable!).
> the artists make most of their money in other ways anyway
It's the other way around. Artists make their money in other ways today, not because of copyright... but because of technology.
When your band gets signed up with a record label, you actually sign away your own copyright. You waive your rights as an author to your material. You basically say to a record label: "In exchange for leveraging your capability to produce, market and distribute millions of copies, I'll agree to 2, 5 or 10% of the revenue of the distribution." That's the deal you signed up for.
As an artist, it used to be that you earned nicely when music/video/movies were still distributed through movie theatres or record shops where consumers bought a physical record. You'd pay maybe 15 or 20$ for the album of your favourite band. And you'd listen to that album for hours on end.
Digital technology and streaming platforms have completely undercut that model. And the price for content has crashed entirely. Today, you don't pay 15$ for just 20 songs on a single album. You pay 15$ a month to get access to a catalogue of tens of thousands of songs. That's the difference.
The biggest issue is that streaming platforms and digital services have taken over distribution of creative content - audio and video - from traditional record labels, movie produces and so on, and have become the new middle men. And it has happened, the artists who signed away their rights see far less in return for their efforts.
This is a huge debate in the industry: https://musically.com/2020/05/05/spotify-should-pay-musician...
At the end of the day, copyright isn't going to go anywhere, I'm afraid. After all, there's no such thing as a free lunch. And that's why modern copyright emerged some 300 years in the first place: Ironically because of the introduction of a new technology. As it happens, with the proliferation of the printing press and movable type, book printers, authors and publishers wanted to put a halt to others piggybacking on the success of selling their materials.