When someone can tell me who owns the number 2, I will tell you who owns our cultural heritage of songs.
Remember: copyright is a legal fiction created by congress that exists solely to prop up industries. Most people don't believe in it, as evidenced by the massive sharing of information on the internet condemned by it.
Example, I mentioned elsewhere that I'm working on producing a screenplay which involves the Happy Birthday song. I'm not enthused about having to budget for license fees for this. On the other hand, without copyright I would not be able to share the script with other people to get feedback or solicit their interest in making it into a film, because I would have no way to protect my interests as an author. From my point of view the screenplay represents about 4 months' worth of labor, and it will likely be 6 months' worth by the time it's at a final draft. As director of the project, that total labor involved will rise to well over a year's worth, more likely two. My ownership interest in the intellectual property is the only hope I have of making money off that investment later on should the film get made and prove popular.
If you don't believe in copyright, what do you think is my economic incentive to create original work, or anyone else's to commission/purchase such work?
I came across a good, if somewhat dry, article summarizing the current state of play as regards this: http://www.law360.com/articles/591491/plot-thickens-for-scre...
http://www.tessgerritsen.com/gravity-lawsuit-affects-every-w...
I agree with your argument within the economic context in which your work occurs, it's the only thing that makes many works of art possible. But copyright is a bad thing because the economic context is bad.
If you had all the money you needed, would you stop producing screenplays? I can't answer for you, but I know the answer for me: if I had all the money I needed, I wouldn't stop writing code or performing music. I think the idea that people need economic incentives to do things, especially creative things, is bogus. People don't need incentives to do things, they need their basic needs met so that they can do things. More often than not, the need to fulfill their basic needs gets in the way of people doing the things that they want, and which might prove the most beneficial. I've certainly written reams of useless code to pay the bills instead of open source work that I wanted to do to further humanity. And I'm sure you've spent time doing things to pay the bills when you could have been working on your screenplay.
Of course we don't live in a world where people's needs can simply be met without effort. But the time is coming when no human will have to lift a finger to survive. What incentive will exist then? The structures we have built around the need to earn our survival will prepare us poorly for the world that will be.
I see two futures: one where the robots and artificial intelligences that meet all our needs are owned by the people who bought them and the rest of us are beholden to them, and another where, in the absence of value derived by economic need, we derive value from our feelings, our experiences, our relationships, and our creations. Copyright lives in the former future: the future I want is the latter.
I find this mystifying. It seems that you're arguing that performative work is somehow deficient or inferior just because it can easily be reproduced. A painting or sculpture is solid and while copies can be made it is relatively easy to distinguish the original work. Literary works are no less carefully crafted, and large numbers of people seem to attach significant value to them judging by the amount of both money and time that people have traditionally chosen to spend on books, theater, films, and so on.
If you had all the money you needed, would you stop producing screenplays?
Of course not, but if I had no prospect of ever realizing income from working in film that would be a major disincentive to do it.
The classic example: for every loaf of bread a baker bakes, the variable costs (raw ingredients, fuel, labour) are approximately the same for each extra loaf baked, so his margin and profit per loaf don't magically increase by baking more.
Contrast this with someone creating a copyrighted work and receiving royalties per instance sold or performed. Here, increased volume does increase margin and profit per instance, because the real cost of labour the creator must put in to receive royalties on every new sale or performance tends to zero. (I'm discounting the cost of marketing etc., which in most cases has only a second-order effect and doesn't change the final result.) Add to this the income which copyright brokers receive from media distributors etc. without having any part in the creative process, and things become very unbalanced real quick.
The root cause of the problem is that it is extremely hard to put a realistic monetary value on the act of creating a copyrighted work, as it would have to take into account the real effort required to create it, as well as the total (mainly intangible) benefit to all who will ever get exposed to it.
It would be much better if the artist could make dealings directly with the audience, just like the baker does with his customers.
As Syd Barrett put it: "All middle men are bad."
Of course, but you have much higher up front costs than the baker, who can bake less during periods of slack demand. You can't paint half of a picture and sell it for half the price you wanted to get. I'm not sure why you think a commodity model is even relevant here. An artistic work has a lot more in common with the erection of a building, which involves large amounts of labor and capital up front, in exchange for an ongoing stream of economic rents over the longer term.
(I'm discounting the cost of marketing etc., which in most cases has only a second-order effect and doesn't change the final result.)
A very dubious assumption. Marketing matters quite a lot IMHO, and certainly as far as films go there's a pretty strong correlation between the marketing budget and the probability of making a financial return. You micht like to check out the reference sources in this article, particularly Vogel: https://storyality.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/storyality-24-on...
Add to this the income which copyright brokers receive from media distributors etc. without having any part in the creative process, and things become very unbalanced real quick.
But it's not just creative, it's administrative as well. If you're a writer you don't want to spend half your time trying to audit your distributors.
It would be much better if the artist could make dealings directly with the audience
That's not realistic in the case of literary works, because you're still up against the copying problem - the text of a book is very easy to copy and it is the product itself.
As Syd Barrett put it: "All middle men are bad."
Much as I admire Syd Barrett artistically, have you considered that he was a) literally incompetent in the mental health sense, and b) that his economic wellbeing was to a large extent dependent on the good will of his former bandmates who ensured that he received royalty monies from record sales? Without their efforts as middlemen he'd probably have ended up institutionalized or homeless.
There's a romantic viewpoint that middlemen in the arts world are all parasitic. They're not; usually the relationship is much more symbiotic, with different parties bringing different skills to the table. So people in Hollywood may grumble about agents in a general sense, but nobody who has one is in a hurry to go back to repping themselves unless they get so rich and famous as to set up their own production company, in which case they hire people to do a lot of the same work.
That's not at all what I'm arguing. In fact, the kinds of artistic work that I most enjoy (books) are easily reproduced with little/no loss in quality.
> Literary works are no less carefully crafted, and large numbers of people seem to attach significant value to them judging by the amount of both money and time that people have traditionally chosen to spend on books, theater, films, and so on.
I totally agree that literary works are equally carefully crafted, but the rest of what you're saying is the economic context which I'm rejecting. You're saying that literature has value and therefore you deserve to be given money for producing it. I'm saying that I think everyone should have enough money to survive, and then they can and will do what they want to do. Doing things you enjoy is both productive and its own reward.
Your statements are based on a fundamental assumption that with enough rules, the monetary system will become meritocratic, rewarding those who produce with wealth and punishing those who don't produce with homelessness and starvation. But the fact is, monetary systems are not meritocratic--people's merits take time and nurturing to develop and monetary systems more often than not prevent that development from happening. I don't think this is possible to fix without a more fundamental overhaul of how we view the relationships between value, merit, and money.
> Of course not, but if I had no prospect of ever realizing income from working in film that would be a major disincentive to do it.
This is spoken from a position of comparatively extreme wealth. You have a prospect of realizing income from working in film, but literally billions of people don't. Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis?
And this doesn't stop with literature and art either: I think that science and engineering are affected by this as well. How many Albert Einsteins and Margaret Hamiltons have starved to death before even reaching adulthood because there was no economic value to their survival?
The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities. The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers.
No I'm not. I'm saying I deserve the opportunity to set the terms on which I sell it instead of having it copied for profit by people with greater financial resources than I have.
Copyright doesn't just protect your rights, it protects the rights of Sony executives who pay pittances to thousands of factory workers in third world countries. How many of those factory workers could have been Stanley Kubricks or Federico Fellinis? [...] The truth is, starving to death is a much greater disincentive to people working on pieces of art than the likelihood that someone will steal their work, and copyright exacerbates the "starving to death" problem by creating inequalities.
WTF - you're placing the entire burden of economic inequity ont he copyright system? that's just nonsense, notwithstanding my skepticism about modern capitalist structures.
The vast majority of money made due to copyright is not made by individuals like you, it's made by corporations like Sony, and executives who didn't produce anything--they just bought it from the producers.
Having those people buy the rights from people like me suits me just fine, because I would rather get paid and do more work than have to do all the business of distribution. It seems to me that you're essentially restating the Marxist Labor theory of Value, and I don't subscribe to that, notwithstanding that I am the laborer in this case. Wealth is not created from labor alone; capital-at-risk (the part put up by big studios) is also a necessary factor of production. If you gather 100 talented or skillful people together you don't necessarily end up with a product - they still need tools to work, raw materials to work on, and the product needs to be brought to market somehow. Digital technology assists with this but it is no way the panacea that some ideological folks imagine it to be. I can't tell you how many otherwise-decent creative micro-budget projects fail because the producers/directors haven't made the right decisions about final manufacturing options (in terms of exactly what they have to produce that distributors are looking for) and marketing (in terms of budgeting for PR or film market exhibition costs to get it in front of distributors). I absolutely think the distribution companies and various intermediaries create significant economic value - it's just not obvious to the general public outside the industry what it is that they do. You might as well say that bankers make a fortune for just pushing papers around or programmers get paid a fat money to sit around and push buttons all day.
My problem is that copyright is misapplied:
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times
to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and
Discoveries."
"If you don't believe in copyright, what do you think is my economic incentive to create original work, or anyone else's to commission/purchase such work?"
Plenty of works are created without direct economic incentive associated with copying the work. Just look at non-commercial YouTubers or open source projects. Music, movies, etc, still come into being. Personally, I would trade the existence of higher-production media for more sane copyright laws.
I think things like literature, theater, and so on have considerable social utility and don't care for your restriction to industrial applications.
Plenty of works are created without direct economic incentive associated with copying the work. Just look at non-commercial YouTubers or open source projects.
As far as arts go, many non-commercial offerings are deeply lacking. Removing the economic incentive reverts the arts to a system of patronage and arguably subverts artistic freedom in many domains (eg theater) by limiting output to suit the whims of the economically powerful.
And again, I would rather have "lacking" artistic offerings in exchange for more sane copyright laws. Besides, there's a certain passion that comes through underdog artists that isn't there in most larger commercial offerings.
The question is, should these sorts of economic incentives exist, and to what scale, given their downsides? Any incentive will drive people into playing the game and optimizing their take, driving the global legislation problems we are currently facing.
Art has always been a poor man's game throughout human history. I think the age we live in now is an anomaly with respect to personal arts and IP-based commercial funding. Historical economic success I can think of would be found in notable performance artists, instrument manufacturers, conservatory instructors, and patronage. None of these are really IP related, but personal skill related and involved in the trade of tangible goods & services found from a particular individual or group, regardless of their ability to be copied.
I also think that there should be a few different levels of licensing (much like the Creative Commons approach) and possibly some sort of price controls for licensing, to be reflective of the fixed pricing for copyright registration that currently obtains. In general I'm against price controls, though, and going down that route could lead to mandatory licensing which would also be undesirable (eg you find your passionate song about freedom used in a political campaign commercial by a candidate whose values you find repellent, and can do nothing about it because anybody has the right to unilaterally license anything).
Other people have proposed increasing copyright renewal fees over time, or renewal fees that were somehow keyed to the economic performance of a copyrighted work, though I think both these approaches are problematic.
YouTube's financial incentivization optimizes towards crappy Minecraft videos moreso than high production value content, since they started rewarding time spent watching over total number of views/subscribers. Such videos are the easiest to create in terms of effort per posted minute of video that is attractive to (enough) viewers.
One of the popular groups (Game Grumps) even explicitly have said so in their videos. Arin/Egoraptor is an animator, but animations are hard work to create and aren't rewarded financially on YouTube anymore, so he specifically went into something where he could make money (doing Let's Plays).
Basically, what you see popular on YT is not because of what people are passionate about, but rather what YT's schemes optimize people to do with their financial carrot.
But copyright just establishes title, and provides the right to recover additional damages from infringers if you register it with Congress. It doesn't set any sort of price structure, so it's perfectly OK to buy the rights to someone's work $1 if you can persuade them to sell at that price (as many session musicians have found out the hard way).
* in passing, I noticed recently that multi-hour videos of rainfall are crazy popular on YT, presumably because of their use as a sleep aid.
Peter Hollens' work is nice, but let's be realistic: what are his expenses? A small sum for a performance license and another small sum to do the recording, a couple of thousand at most per work that he puts out. Now compare the costs of staging a theatrical work or making an independent film. It's not that that type of artwork is fundamentally better, but that the up front costs are much higher because of the resources involved. A distributed patronage model is no good here because you're dealing with a very different sort of product.
While the funding models need to evolve (and I'm optimistic about Title III equity crowdfunding becoming available alter this year), I'm quite skeptical of people coming along and saying 'movie copyrights suck, because Disney' while having very little appreciation of how the majority of films get made outside the 100 or so well-financed pictures released by Hollywood major and mini-major studios.
It's somewhat the same problem with distributed patronage. It does work much better for episodic stuff as well as issue-driven documentaries and so on. But if you're limited to that approach then you're looking at no long-form stories, no historical fiction/fantasy/sci-fi and so forth, because of the up-front costs involved. Cameras and media storage are much cheaper than they used to be, but you still need things like lighting, props, locations, costumes and so on. The best prospect on teh horizon is Title III (equity) crowdfunding, where you are actually able to sell ownership units in the film rather than having to do a separate campaign of rewards/swag in return for donations. The Kickstarter/IndieGogog model has a lot going for it, but it strongly favors established rather than new properties.
The model for films today seems to be mostly driven by critic reviews, 2 minute trailers, and whatever all your friends are seeing at the cinema that weekend, which doesn't seem like a particularly good model either.
It's not so bad - people within the industry know how it works and there are established strategies for how to launch films of different budget levels. Bear in mind that the theatrical release is (except for the very largest films) basically just a marketing campaign for the DVD/streaming release. The fact of a film having played in theaters is an economic signal to consumers that it will provide a certain minimum level of technical quality.
It's hard for me to be sympathetic for some media just because they have higher costs. As the interminable stream of kitten free videos demonstrates, entertainment does not need to be expensive.
So maybe we are talking about "art" in some sense? Even art doesn't need to be expensive now. Cameras are cheap. Simple video editing software is relatively cheap (or free even). You could remake classics like "Twelve Angry Men" and film a relatively minimalist production of "Hamlet" for less than the cost of a new economy car (assuming your small cast and crew work for shares of revenue). I think critically successful movies like "Primer" and "El Mariachi" demonstrate that rather well.
> ...while having very little appreciation of how the majority of films get made...
I get how they're made. But I honestly don't care. Cheap media are just new forms of disruption, if you ask me.
I like me some kittens as much as the next guy, but it's a different sort of product. When I want to watch a movie, 2 hours of kittens aren't a good substitute, the same way that I sometimes prefer to curl up with a good book rather than spend more time reading comments on HN or tweets on Twitter.
It's not that you should be sympathetic to those media with higher costs, as that such art forms couldn't come to be absent some system of copyright in the first place, and the fact of consistent demand over the last century shows that those kinds of entertainment have huge economic utility for consumers. Again, I'm not arguing for the Disney perpetual copyright approach here, but especially in this era of virtually cost- and effort-free digital copying, you can't realistically plan to recoup your production investment without some sort of way to assert authorship.
film a relatively minimalist production of "Hamlet" for less than the cost of a new economy car (assuming your small cast and crew work for shares of revenue)
You can, indeed. But this is itself a problem: actors and crew need to work to gain experience and exposure, but more and more often they're asked to work for free. It's very very hard to get those shares of revenue to turn into anything resembling cash, especially if you don't have a budget for marketing, and so people, especially crew, are constantly being asked to work long days without even getting paid minimum wage, because returns are so uncertain. Without some sort of reasonably robust copyright system, the incentives to do that get even worse.
I think critically successful movies like "Primer" and "El Mariachi" demonstrate that rather well.
Not as well as you imagine; bear in mind that the tiny #s you hear about associated with films like this are part of the marketing in just the same way as big budgets on blockbuster movies. Primer is a very good idea in a pretty bad film - a fair bit of its apparent complexity comes from obscurity, eg the scenes at the party later in the film are hard to figure out because you can't see what's going on on the screen very well. I like reading the script more than watching it. And I think it's kind of significant that despite the success of Primer Carruth has only made one other film, Upstream Color, which most people outside the experimental film community find incoherent at best.
El Mariachi got nearly $1m of additional post-production work (paid for by the distributor) to fix the soundtrack - originally the scenes were recorded without sound and Rodriguez had the actors repeat their lines into a tape recorder afterwards - and to do a proper film transfer, vs the videotaped version shown at Sundance. But nobody outside of the filmmaker community talks about that (although it's no secret, Rodriguez detailed it at length in a book he wrote and is great about sharing his knowledge in general). Plus, even the figure for production costs are a bit deceptive; Rodriguez got loaned a lot of equipment for free, and shot in a town in Mexico where he was able to borrow guns from the local police through a personal connection, among various other freebies.
Why do you think that, it hasn't been 95 years since 1935, or is that a suggestion?
"I think things like literature, theater, and so on have considerable social utility and don't care for your restriction to industrial applications."
I get that you think that, but it has no basis in intellectual property law. It's entirely the opposite, the more utility something has the less protection it gets.
It's too complex to explain in a comment, plus it's late.
That's why I referred you to external sources for the lawsuit, because I don't want to make definitive comments about the legal merits of either side's case in this thread - it's been a few months since I even looked through the complaint.
> If you don't believe in copyright, what do you think is
> my economic incentive to create original work, or anyone
> else's to commission/purchase such work?
I do comment frequently on HN just to be social or pass the time. But I don't attach much economic value to those comments, except in the most general sense of maybe winning friends and influencing people.
I'm pretty conflicted about copyright myself, but in principle it seems very valid. The issues are in the nuances and details, just like drivers' licenses make sense in principle but one can argue on the details (driving age, driving lessons, license costs etc). Contrary to existing copyright law, as a creator I wouldn't mind if a movie or song I made today became public domain in 2040 for example, and I think most people can agree to this. So obviously some of the current details of copyright law are ridiculous but that's different from implying that copyright law shouldn't exist at all.
> What are you implying here? That humans do things without economic
> incentive, thus everything can be done with economic incentive?
> That's a ridiculous extrapolation.
You then proceed to bring yourself along to the point I was making -- it's a matter of degree, and self-valuation (as the parent alludes to later) is the primary factor in determining what can and can't be done, or over what time frame, with someone's output.
Not that self-valuation isn't important - but it probably shouldn't be entirely self, or entirely others', role to determine the value of someone's output / contribution to society.
Other examples of people creating great work without copyright include a vast array of BSD, MIT and Apache licensed software. Business models in creating information exist without the flawed ideas of intellectual property.
Originally it intended to protect those creating new intellectual property, but like most things it's been corrupted to be something the rich use against everyone else.
100 years ago, after 10 or so years anything copyrighted became public domain, it's only fairly recently that copyright has extended passed the authors death.
Obviously the current life-plus-even-more term is a more recent change in the US, but the Berne Convention (not yet joined by the US at the time) required minimum terms of life plus 50 years starting in 1908.
Most people are quick to change their tune when it's their work that is getting copied.
Software patents may be broken, but we shouldn't throw away everything because of it.
For example, this message is would be copyrighted by me in most countries. I have absolutely no problem with you making a copy of it (or any other message I've written on HN). To be fair, I completely forget if there is a license clause in the HN agreement that I clicked on when I got my account, but if there isn't I hereby release every message I have ever written on HN under CC0. I don't feel in any way diminished by my action ;-)
Even with software, the vast majority of things I write, I assign copyright to the people who pay me. In fact, copyright is not important to the way I work. I don't write it and then hope someone will pay me after the fact. I have a contract which says that they will pay me for my effort of writing software. Heck, as the old Dilbert cartoon showed, I could twiddle my thumbs all day and I would still get paid (for a while).
Even for the programming I do outside of work, while I usually choose the GPL, if there was not copyright I wouldn't need to worry about licenses and I would still write the code. It would affect me slightly, but I wouldn't be marching down the street trying to reinstate copyright because people were "stealing" my code.
I have had old posts on usenet (yes, I'm that old) stuck on websites even with the wrong attribution (people taking "credit" for my crappy writing... suckers). There is no way I am worried enough to send a takedown request.
I don't think I'm unusual in this respect. In fact, I think the vast majority of people operate the same way. The people who do care are the people who create something in advance (usually without getting paid) and who hope to monetize it later. I have no problem imagining that most of them would cry foul when their work is copied. Every body else (i.e. most of the people in the world)? Not so much.
In time, RIAA will be one of the biggest entities on the planet?
In time, they will be sending every offending individual isp a demand letter. The fines will be low of course, at first, but will rise like traffic infractions have in the past twenty years? (I've heard this is alwready taking place?)
In time, we will still use the Internet, but it will end up being so filled with so many potential fines, it might not be worth going on? Notice in the mail from RIAA, "We see you visited www.ingringement of 1-1-2020. The blog had a copy written JPEG on the landing page. Since you looked at the picture, please send us $20.00 and we won't collate all infractions of isp 255:255:255.01 and take you to court."
I see the day, when you hear people saying, "Yea, It's just not worth the risk of a fine."
If I'm alive to see it. I could picture myself saying, "I never should have gotten rid of all my physical books, and I should have kept all those disks of music and entertainment?" They are collectors items now--who would have thought?"
I would like to see every isp provider purge history immediatly, if technically and legally possible? I'm not sure if ISPs like Comcast, Version, and AT&T could provide access to the Internet without keeping track of individual isp addresses. I don't know why they need to keep a detailed history of every isp we clicked on? Something like TOR, but a commercial version, that every customer would be required to use according to TOS.
Right now they(Facebook, and Google) could be proactive, and start deleting just some of our data on the servers--instead of buying just more space? (and yes, I know you own the information.) Start with deleting the information you keep on us that over 10 years ago? Please? We might remember the act of kindness when you are begging for customers in the future?
Mainly what I see is similar to using amendments to "poison" legislation. The abuse at the core of the current crazy USA rules (and then the USA forcing other countries to adopt USA rules) has poisoned the merits of copyright so much that many people find the current copyright reality abhorrent.
Now it also isn't the greatest comparison as the "poison" amendments are specifically created to exploit voting blocks to have to support the amendment that then creates legislation that can't gain enough votes to pass.
And the copyright law has been created by politicians giving companies that pay them lots of money legislation they want. There was no intent to create an unpalatable system so that people would revolt and demand change. So far it hasn't been so unpalatable as to cause the whole thing to collapse under the weight of poisonous amendments. And in fact with TPP we likely to see the USA again forcing new poisonous provisions onto our vassal states.
But what has happened is those poisonous provision have created a large number of people that are extremely unhappy with the current state of copyright. They just so far have been readily outmaneuvered over and over by the copyright cartel folks (as is happening with TPP, most likely, yet again).
It seems we might be getting close to a tipping point, but maybe not. But in any event I think the anti-copyright talk is much more anti-the-poisonous-copyright-extentions-that-have-nearly-no-economic-justification. I feel that way myself. While at the same time believing sensible copyright rules (the USA constitution seems about right in spirit) are wise. Something close to the years we originally had instead of all the extensions that have been added seems reasonable to me. I'm sure not to others. I feel very strongly the current rules are vastly too restrictive on moving work to the public domain and it is doing great damage to our economy as things stand now.
You jest, but the number 2 is implicitly copyrighted, and illegal. Why?
Well. There are integers which are illegal, such as the DeCSS prime.
It's equally illegal to publish a number which is (illegal number) - 1 with instructions of "just add 1".
Given that you could publish the number 2 (or 1), and say "just add (huge number)", and that you could publish an infinitely (except not infinity) immense integer and say "just subtract (huge number)", it stands to reason that there is no smallest illegal integer, nor a largest illegal integer.
Thus, all integers are illegal.
Why would people put in the massive effort to make music, movies, and games if they didn't own it afterwards?
I do. I'd like to see copyright completely abolished. I think it does far more harm than good.
I'm pretty sure there would not have been that many Terry Pratchett or Iain Banks books in the world without enforced copyrights (just as an example - my early life was occasionally crappy and these authors provided very many positive experiences then).
It's not the obvious copyrights that are annoying, IMO, it's the fact that large copyright holders attempt to curb/take a cut of every frigging positive externality that pops up.
Musicians who perform live could survive professionally in a copyrightless world (one way or another). Novelists and composers? I have no idea.
However, as you say, what about the Iain Banks' of this world? Well, I don't think much would change for them either. They'd write a novel, do a promotional tour, appearing for talks and signings, and hopefully sell lots of copies.
I think I'll let you respond here rather than anticipating your reply.
Maybe relevant: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ksy/follow_your_dreams_as_a_case_stu...
Copyright predates Congress, they can hardly take credit for having invented it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Anne
Well, the number 13,256,278,887,989,457,651,018,865,901,401,704,640 is actually copyrighted.
You can't mean the physical expression, for instance, because that is the area covered by laws against theft. Copyright only covers expressions of ideas which are themselves ideas.
Here's where you probably want to get started. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_divide
1. Economic significance - Art takes effort to create, and people are willing to pay money for it.
2. Cultural significance - Art moves a culture in unforeseen ways, so its cultural legacy should be available for all.
Copyright should provide a limited period of time where the artist / creator can benefit from #1. But eventually #2 should take over, and we've delayed that transition long past the point of cultural relevance. Now by the time copyrighted works expire into the public domain, they are so dated that nobody wants them anyway.
IMO copyright should last for the life of the creator or 25 years from the initial publication date of the work, whichever is longer. In the case where a company claims copyright on a work, the term should be 25 years. In the case where a creator assigns copyright to another person or company, copyright will revert to 25 years from initial publication. In the case of long-lived iconic brands such as Star Wars or Mickey Mouse, trademark laws can be expanded slightly to avoid confusion in the market.
Intellectual property has real value, and we shouldn't throw it away because we don't agree with the business models around it. But we also shouldn't lock all of our cultural artifacts behind a paywall: they need to be released into the public domain while they are still relevant.
If physical property rights are respected and I own a pen and paper, or a hard drive, I have the right to arrange ink on the paper, or magnetic fields on the drive in any pattern I please. To say that one pattern is forbidden is to assume ultimate authority of my property and it is no longer exclusively mine.
I don't think that nobody has any methods to protect information. Keeping secrets and securing those secrets with voluntary contracts is perfectly legitimate. But if one party breaches that contract, only the party that agreed to it can be liable. Not a third party who never agreed to it.
The idea of intellectual property as a thing is absurd. Intellectual property is not rivalrous, another having it does not deprive the original owner of its use. It is not subject to the same limits as physical property, so the economics that are part of trading physical property don't apply.
That's very US centric. Look into the history of copyright. It's more interesting than that.
What else would you expect from an industry that drives on ideas?