Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work. If I write something, I control what is done with it. No random person can just come along and appropriate it to that person's use or profit. I can say no to that or I can say yes, as I determine. If I say yes, I can require that person to compensate me for using my work or I can decide that I don't want compensation because I want others to freely benefit from my work. The point is that it is my decision. I have sole control over what is done with that which I create. Why? Because the law protects that right. And it does so, for the most part, through copyright.
When people propose that copyright be abolished, they are saying, if effect, that anybody who produces a creative work immediately forfeits any right to control it and that any random person can come along and freely enjoy the benefits of that work and also freely reproduce and distribute that work. Under that sort of legal system, I can attempt to sell my work, or license it, or perform it publicly, but anybody else can do the same. Why? Because it is no longer "my" work, at least not legally. It is not protected in any way from the efforts of others to exploit it commercially or to give it away as they like. It is anyone's right to do with it what he will. Now, of course, I may rejoice in this. I may desire to create something wonderful and see to it that it is freely distributed to the maximum degree possible because I feel it is important that people benefit from my creative output without any obligation to me. Under a society in which copyright is protected, I can freely choose to do that if I like. I can place my work in the public domain and relinquish any right to compensation for it. Or I can let others use it freely but only on if they meet some condition that I impose on it, such as giving me attribution. The point is that this is my decision. If copyright does not exist, though, I have no such rights and I have no such control. In that case, anybody can use it, replicate it, seek to profit from it, claim it as his own, or whatever, all without my having any say whatever in that process. In such a system, anything created by anybody is simply common property. People can use it for good or for bad but I have no say in it. I may be the creator but that is beside the point. People like the author of this piece can simply saunter by and take it for whatever use the like.
When a society makes a decision to defend the right of a creative person to control his work, and to profit from it or give it away as he likes, it has to make all sorts of policy decisions. Should such control last indefinitely? Of course not. Why? Because the benefits that we all get from being able to control our creative work only last so long. After a time, and certainly after we die, we have presumably exhausted whatever benefit we get from such control. Then too, others also create and, in time, all sorts of people borrow from one another and build upon the efforts of others regardless of the degree of creativity that they add to the process. Given enough time, we get what is known as a "common heritage" - something that far transcends the creative work of any one person. And so we have what is known as a public domain - a rich collection of creative output that is freely available to all. Those who value copyright and its social benefits in protecting creative output also value the public domain because it is a natural concomitant to the protected core of works that fall under copyright in any given generation. Indeed, a key aspect of copyright is precisely to encourage people to create - to invest the very blood and sweat that it often takes to do something great - in order that society generally will be enhanced and improved as creative works are done, are made available to the world as the creator may decide, and eventually pass into the public domain. So a fundamental tenet of copyright is that it cannot be absolute. It needs to be strictly bounded to achieve its legitimate goals without being extended to a point where it defeats those goals and gives special privileges to persons for no good reason.
Today, copyright has been seriously abused in the U.S. and elsewhere and needs to be fixed. In particular, terms of copyright need to be brought back to sensible levels. The public domain as it exists needs to be preserved and a better system needs to be in place by which orphaned works can freely enter the public domain. Many other fixes are needed as well. What is most definitely not needed is a SOPA-style enforcement scheme that opens up legal channels to copyright holders that would permit all sorts of abusive actions against innocent parties in the name of copyright enforcement. This sort of thing merely perpetuates the abuse and does not fix anything. Those who have been paying attention strongly sense this, and it has been pretty amazing to watch people unite to oppose the back-room sleaziness that led to such legislative efforts in the first place.
To defeat SOPA, though, one must affirm copyright. Just as we recoil at legal abuse in a SOPA-style scheme, we equally recoil at self-righteous claims that people can freely take what others create with no consideration whatever given to those who create it. That sort of radical assertion will get us nowhere when it comes to shaping serious legal policy in the SOPA debate. It needs to be roundly rejected.