Dying embers of copyright
Anyone standing back and looking over the broad sweep of copyright 'infringement' and enforcement during the decades following WW2 will notice that the former is hotting up apace and the latter is almost in a state of panic.
Prior to widespread adoption of digital representation, cheap digital storage, and, nowadays, digital transmission, copyright was mostly an arcane topic arising in disputes among book publishers, film makers, best-selling authors, popular music composers, and like minded persons with money to spare to enrich lawyers. Copyright, just like libel, was a rich man's hobby. The general public was occasionally entertained by newspaper accounts of court proceedings wherein two (alleged) composers of popular ditties came head to head before a jury with one claiming that a snatch of notes in a (usually) unmeritorious piece was purloined by the other; these events were displays of arrogance and entitlement, this generally arising from the plaintiff.
Copyright began impinging directly on the public mind only after technological advance increased opportunity for casual 'infringement' and drove demands by rights' holders for the technology to be restricted. Thus, home taping, crude at first, followed by home video recording technologies came on the scene. Photocopier use in educational establishments became a bugbear of, ever cash hungry, print publishers. In UK universities elaborate arrangements came into being whereby each photocopy (within rigorous definition of permitted number of pages and so forth) was to be accompanied by filling in a form detailing the work and pages copied. Librarians were obliged to oversee this nonsense because otherwise their institutions would be vulnerable to litigation. Nevertheless, beyond the gaze of librarians few people bothered with form filling and university authorities wisely didn't peer under stones.
Advent of personal computers opened fresh pastures for 'infringement'. CDs, DVDs, and then the ubiquitous Internet, spilled all the worms out of the can.
What's learned from this big picture is the inevitability of copyright's demise (and replacement by entitlement to attribution). The pace of 'infringement' is not matched by the rate of increase of effective remedies to prevent, deter, and punish 'infringement' among the general public. Efforts to persuade people otherwise, such as the foolish mantra 'copying is theft', are yielding little if anything. Unless the Internet is clamped down upon to such an extent that even legislators, in the pockets of copyright cartels, find it objectionable, no number of fingers in holes in dykes ('dams' in case of misunderstanding) can avert copyright Armageddon.
Two factors contribute to the death of copyright. First, copyright nowadays is bad law in the sense of not being easily enforced (at the level of individuals) and with respect to widespread disobedience as a rational solution to coughing up ever more disposable income to price-gouging entities.
The second, reason is the consequence of digital representation revealing, to those who would look, innate irremediable flaws in the concept of copyright. Digital representation draws attention to the fact that digital sequences are not dependent on particular instances of a physical substrate. That is, the information contained has distinctly separate existence to any physical object fitting the definition of 'property'. This is reinforced by the fact that digital sequences can endlessly be reproduced with no loss of 'content' and at negligible cost. Attempts to produce artificial scarcity of ephemeral sequences of digits must fail. Thus, market-economics depending on scarcity and on supply and demand, are meaningless. There can be no such thing as 'intellectual property' unless its kept within it's creator's head or sequestered under lock and key on a physical medium.
Additionally the notion of copyright protecting creative activities doesn't wash either. In fact, copyright stifles imagination by seeking to control or limit 'derivative works'; reality is that no work arises ab initio i.e. without context.
There is more to be said against the "chilling effect" of copyright, but not now. Suffice to say that means exist for (genuinely rather than 'manufactured') creative people to thrive from their work; these don't entail making claim of ownership (as in physical property) of created 'content' or need for elaborate middleman distribution chains acting as monopoly providers at any price they can squeeze out of the masses.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
