Now, like I said previously, there are currently issues with copyright, and this can cross into rent seeking if I try to extract money from your own original works of art (see the family of Marvin Gaye), and there are issues with the length of copyright (i.e. I believe there is a fundamental difference in protecting the right of a creator while they're alive, vs. the rights of inheritors in perpetuity). But the whole concept of rent seeking is around using the power of government to extract money from others simply because you were there first, not around allowing unlimited copying of truly original works.
Why should society not have the right for its traditional interactive way of exchanging culture? Extending the duration of copyright was a perverse move, and now blocking the right to repair is another perverse move. DMCA put all publishers at the whim of agencies spamming takedowns with impunity even for no reason at all. Artists more recently would like to copyright abstractions to block generative AI from reusing their ideas.
People need their traditional ways back. We started open source, made Wikipedia, we now have open scientific publication, teachers share prep materials. Clearly there is a sign that copyright is not essential for society. Copyleft or sharing is more important.
A lot of information is generated by taking some financial risk with the hopes of creating something of value and recouping that investment + some profit. Copyright makes that kind of venture possible. It doesn't prevent altruistic souls from putting in the same effort without any expectation of return. We always had this, by default. Copyright framework allows pursuit, generation and dissemination of huge swaths of valuable information that would otherwise not exist.
If I'm a business that can make money on the service contract I can sell the unit at a lower price. Now I'm forced to make the unit cost higher.
I assume it's one of those things where a few corpos just outplayed 99% of the population
-Chomsky
It’s an anti-consumer stance to force copyright to nearly 100 years and allow no format swapping under a hilariously broad set of normal transmission and format-swapping techniques.
I'm pretty sure that the reason that copyright laws are the way they are is because certain industries in the US lobby the government to strong arm other countries into adopting onerous copyright restrictions as part of free trade agreements.
Whatever you feel about the merits of intellectual property laws the idea that they're wrapped up as 'free trade' when they in fact make things that would otherwise be free cost money is downright Orwellian.
Maybe countries that don't really have a film or tv industry don't want to see copyright on those products and why would they? Why would they want to see their citizens paying American countries for something that would otherwise be free?
I think the primary reason the "spirit" of current copyright broke down is because it's been reduced to hoarding over protecting. the idea is that I can license out an idea if I really want to make use of it. So creations flow and the company makes their own cut out of it.
But I can't just walk up to Disney and pay 100 dollars ,1000, maybe even 1 million to grab Mickey Mouse and work with something. Depending on their products, they may not want anyone using Mickey period, even if there is no mickey product cycle. You basically need to be EA or Mattel or Warner Bros. to even begin being considered for such a thing.
That's their right but it spoils the social contract. When everything by default is locked down, there is no creation flowing. Just broken dreams for abandoned franchises everyone else would love to make use of.
Rent seeking limits innovation, needlessly drives up costs, creates barriers where there shouldn't be any, encourages predatory economic behaviors, suppresses competition, and ultimately leads to monopolistic and or oligopolic wealth and power structures.
It's universally bad practice that results in bad outcomes for society and we should move away from enabling and indeed incentivizing that kind of economic behavior.