It occurs to me I have never written a reference for my stance on the copyright debacle of the 21st century, so I'll talk about my historical views of copyright, and where we go from here.
A long time ago, in a land far far away (at least an ocean away) the ideas of copyright were primarily motivated to prevent someone from taking your mathematical formulae, or written works, and claiming them as their own. It was wholly to protect an inventor of new things from having their "ideas" stolen.
In the US (this focuses on the US, because this is the land of copyright enforcement worldwide sadly) those policies meant that authors could publish their books with recourse if someone started making bootleg copies and trying to either sell or freely distribute them. They made the copyright on material last 25 years, which meant an author had effective monopoly on the distribution and usage of their ideas until that period expired, when it would enter public domain and anyone could use that work, without even citing a source.
In practice, this just meant that once something went public domain, you could nary profit off it anymore. In practice, it would mean that the price of a public domain book was only limited to the costs of actually printing and distributing said book, since market economics dictated that since the actual work printed was now free to use, anyone could print it.
This also applied to works of art, where bootleg replicas would violate the copyright of a painter, if you were to trace duplicate something, you could be taken to court by the original creator.
Disney came around in the 20th century, and on the nascent currents of a budding film industry, started creating animated films. Steamboat Willie, being the historical point of reference for copyright term today, being made in 1928. Since then, Disney has lobbied for extensions of copyright (I am still unaware of who the content creator of the film is attributed to in the lifetime + 70 years terminology) to keep that film out of public domain so that they can still claim ownership of Mickey Mouse.
Now, my opinion is that that is highly toxic to culture and society. By perpetually preventing the creative media of long dead authors from entering public domain it prevents modern artists from openly deriving works and perpetuating culture in a legally unambiguous way. Today, artists and authors create works of derivative value from still copyrighted material, even that which has absolutely become a part of culture (Bugs Bunny, Star Wars, James Bond). Even works as recent as the Lord of the Rings films or Harry Potter I would argue are absolutely essential culture in a significant portion of western society and media.
Instead of having the unambiguous law of deriving art and creative endeavor from public domain works, modern artists live in a society where an extremely huge portion of their inspiration is still under copyright of some corporate entity, even with long dead authors, and will be until there is some fundamental societal change that deems the continued perpetual copyright of everything unacceptable. Content creators are perpetually at the mercy of corporate entities that "own" the ideas behind almost everything in modern creative media, and that is tremendously harmful to society.
Likewise, very little culture from the last century is freely available. It is all under copyright, owned by some business that intends to sell and profit off limited distribution and legal monopoly for all time. This leads me to the critical point here, and why this is only becoming a really significant issue in the age of the internet.
Before everyone in the world became connected over electrical pulses across wires in the last 20 years, the act of distributing bootleg copies of creative works was itself a costly act. The physical video tapes, or photo paper, necessary to reproduce something was cost prohibitive enough that people wouldn't try to freely give material they possess without cost. Under those grounds, it becomes very obvious that someone selling copies is making money where the original creator should have been - under the original pretenses of copyright. Likewise, it was never frowned upon (and in many ways this is the folly of the industries backing draconian copyright law) for average joes to make copies of the media they possessed to share with friends and family, at least for a time between the 70s and 90s. Children would share cassette tapes, and parents would replicate a VHS tape to give to a neighbor, or loan it. They would share the media.
This also brings up another important distinction - since the olden times of copyright law, we have shifted the channels in which we impart and distribute the things we place under copyright. It is a violation of intellectual property to take a car produced by Ford, and rebuild it from scratch using the original car as a template. That violates Ford's patents on the designs of the vehicle. Patents, unlike copyright, exist as a way to say "I came up with this original invention rather than a work of art, and this is how I made it - nobody else can make this thing for some number of years, because I did it first". However, a significant portion of what was easily understood as patented - mechanical parts, schemata, building plans - and that which is copyrighted - works of art, writing, "ideas" that aren't "inventions" (even in the definitions they blur, though patents are specific enough to require a thorough specification of the patented good to be submitted to the patent office, as opposed to copyright which is assumed).
In the same realm as why software patents are horribly wrong, a lot of the ideas behind patents are socially destructive - if someone comes up with a medical breakthrough, rather than having market forces drive the costs of their creation to just the money it takes to make the product, they get an exclusive right to authorize its creation. This is one of the drivers for why the pharmaceutical industry is as large as it is - the cost of making a pill is scant, but you need to recoup millions in investment in creating a cure.
Patents, however, are still another whole pie of wrong and disaster to be dealt with later. Back to copyright.
Entering the 21st century, we are now able to distribute the things relegated to copyright - art, music, and IP - for free. We can recreate them, for free. We have intentionally been driven to represent them as information rather than any more physical form because information is cheap in the computer age. The revolution of the transistor has allowed us to convey knowledge for very little cost. The next revolution will be to convey the physical world at a similar lack of expense. But for now, we have the ability (and take advantage) of the capacity to replicate the numbers we store and transfer through these machines we have to whoever wants them, at an extremely negligible cost of electrisity on our parts. We do this freely now. Where the bootlegger in 1990 couldn't fathom shipping copies of Star Wars 6 to everyone in the US, he could stick it in a torrent and let anyone that wants it download it. It might take forever if nobody else participates in the sharing, but it is never financially impeding his ability to spread the knowledge he possesses.
And this requires a thorough definition - a VHS tape contains physically imprinted images on film. The film is magnified and displayed in rapid succession in a VCR to create the appearance of moving pictures. Physical pictures are pigments imbedded in some form of tree pulp or some other medium. Music is interesting in that we have never been able to recreate it in a physical medium - we have always been sending audio by way of electrical impulses or some other information form. Speakers themselves just reproduce sine waves of reverberations to create audible sounds. Sound itself is just distortions of air hitting ear drums. The only way to represent that is as a mathematical formula.
However, today, we don't store our videos on VHS tapes. Hell, our TVs never displayed VHS as magnified film - a VHS player would encode the images into a signal to be sent over coaxial cable, or S-video, or some other electrical medium as a numeric pattern of electrical pulses. That was already information. It is why we can rip the VHS tapes we had. It is how broadcast television works.
The medium we use today skips the intermediary physical form to massively increase available space and minimize costs - dvds and blu-ray disks are just magnitized platters storing numbers. The number forms we use, h264, or dalaa, or vp8, to "encode" a pixel map (and successive pixel maps to create the appearance of moving pictures) are all just mathematical formulae (that *&%# MPEG-LA can patent because of software patents). We take numbers, put them through a formula, and then use the resulting number as a pattern to electrically stimulate crystals in a display to generate certain colors in a grid. That produces a picture. We display pictures in rapid succession to create the appearance of motion.
That video is a number - the audio, also a number. Words are also numbers - unicode characters are just upwards of 4 bytes to denote a glyph representing some symbol from some language or other utility case. The machine will take the number and display the corresponding glyph it knows. Still numbers. Still information, still knowledge.
Because in the end, knowing a number is posessing knowledge - to know Pi is 3.1415826535 is to have information. To know the formulae to derive Pi is also knowledge.
Knowledge is cheap. It is easy to convey - we have passed knowledge through ages where physical possessions were much more scarce. History by word of mouth existed long before writing on physical possessions. It is easier to convey now more than ever - with the computer revolution, the distribution of knowledge anywhere on the Earth becomes exceedingly cheap compared to even half a century ago. A satellite can send electromagnetic radiation (radio waves) in a targeted direction to convey information. Interpret the wavelength or period of that waveform as a bit pattern, consider it in base 2, and you have any number. Any number can create any of the pictorial, videographic, or audible material ever produced if such material has been realized as such a number. Scanners, microphones, and cameras all work to capture the physical information (though all visual media is just capturing other electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum through the reflection of light off a pigmeted surface) can all be interpreted as such a number.
As a consequence, all we see, all we hear, all we sense has to be numbers, because we interpret them with brains that experience through electrical signals. Just like computers. The mediums through which we experience our environments are analogous to the mediums computers operate in, and thus our "world" is easily digitized.
Today, information is easy to convey. It is so inexpensive to reproduce a number digitally with a computer that it is effectively free. To convey the number, we have laid wiring to send numbers almost anywhere in the world. These wires are cheap, and the power necessary to send a signal over them is negligible. We can effectively freely convey information.
So we possess numbers. We have duplicates of some source number, be it Pi, or a Beatles song, the Illiad, a picture of your grandparents, or Star Trek: Wrath of Khan. These numbers are easy to replicate, and easy to distribute. Culture and experience are defined by our senses and how we process the world around us - through the same medium we can send information for free. This collective knowledge, and the culture and information contained therein, is physically able to be shared without cost and without hardship.
We don't do that, though, because we have laws originally meant to prevent bootleggers from undercutting an author selling their book. In my philosophy, even the bootlegger was fine to me - if you possess something, you should be able to do whatever you want with the knowledge you can derive from it, including recreating it, and distributing said copy.
The creation of knowledge is not something to be funded on a profit motive. The cost associated is in creating the knowledge - in forging it - not in distributing it, or replicating the result. A thousand years ago, trying to distribute a book was by far the dominate cost - and it was logical to charge for that. To recoup the costs of creating the content by making money on units. Today, the latter two are completely free, and the former is as expensive as ever, if not more so.
Charge the expense. If you want to create knowledge, ask people to pay you to create it. Don't abuse archaic law that artificially restricts the propagation of knowledge and information indefinitely as a means to create income. If you make something people want, people will pay you to make it. If those who possess the result never chose to distribute it, that is fine - it is a conscience choice. If someone does decide to freely release the knowledge, you should have no right to demand it not be given by others.
I am firmly against the ideas behind copyright and patent. I don't believe that true inventors and visionaries care about possessing an indefinite monopoly on the distribution of their creations. They create out of passion, and if they produce things of value, would easily find those who value their work to pay them to create more. Rather than having wealthy investors who are creating knowledge to profit from, knowledge should be funded by those who crave more knowledge and want to see it created.
We are at an extreme end of the spectrum - knowledge is never free, unless the creator goes out of their way to make it so. If they don't actively make it free, it will remain forever restricted and punishable by law to speak the numbers that reproduce this knowledge to the mind. Hopefully, we come back from the extreme. Maybe even one day, we will see the err of our ways as a species and realize knowledge is not something to profit from, but to freely share, yet it is something we need to value and put our resources towards seeing made.
As an addendum, I want to argue against the counterpoint to direct funding of knowledge creation - that people won't spend their money to see new content made if they don't have to pay to experience it. The problem is that people will consume resources they possess, even if they don't need to in most cases. Very few people are actually rational actors that conserve resources - if, suddenly, all the lost culture from the last century and for the foreseeable future became freely available, all the excess funds people would obtain, they would probably spend on physical possessions in truth. Then they would realize without funding, the creators of the knowledge they appreciate evaporates without monetary support, and they would literally put their money where they mouth is - something they like, like Harry Potter, they would actively put money into to see it happen. I absolutely think the contract negotiations in investing in the creation of this content requires something beyond the take-money-and-run guarantees of something like Kickstarter, but that is a negotiation of funding. It isn't some legal wall against information.
Another issue is attribution - I do believe in this. If you use something created by someone else, I would much prefer it require acknowledgement the source. I do think that sufficiently ambient culture becomes pervasive enough that you can't deceive about the original author, but in the limited case of few actors, you want to keep someone who created a painting from having someone else take it and claim it to be their own. So while I am firmly against laws against the distribution of knowledge, I do think attribution is still important, and should be maintained for the life of the creator, including in the case of a derivative work - though I don't want to see a judicial system bogged down with everyone claiming every other work was derivative, so I would rather see it where the direct usage of ideas of someone else, provable in direct quotation or reference, as requiring attribution. It goes back to the original purpose of copyright - preventing someone else from claiming your work as their own - not in preventing the spread of knowledge.
