Frivolous information isn't intended to be covered, it doesn't have an application that expands (as methods rather than material) the quality of type of things educated people can do.

This was also created in an era where even sound recordings didn't exist. Copyright as initially created nearly everywhere, exists in a world where the printing press exists, but is still enough of a pain to work with that books are higher value items for commoners. E.G. this is an era where farmer's almanacs of all the things useful for a farmer in a year get published as a book to improve the skills of a very common job.

The duration of copyright has also been abusively extended by... specific entities. In reality such draconian periods should only be possible as a form of consumer protection; as Trade Marks.

Copyright with a far more reasonable term length would allow material to enter the public domain within people's lifetimes, and a leading and trailing edge for culture as new ideas are created and then as greater spread and work based on those ideas is integrated into a culture would encourage better entertainment as current works would need to compete with recent classics.

I have no idea what a good copyright law is, but assuming that one can be crafted, I think it would be totally reasonable for said law to be implemented.

From first principles, it still seems like a publisher should have a reasonable right to protect their content from theft.

Companies and governments push anti consumer laws to keep copyright away from the public domain forever. Public resources are spent to protect the interests of this enterprises. Companies engage in anti consumer practices such as exclusives and hard to cancel services.

This makes it impossible to have sympathy for the companies.

The alternative is one in which private companies are expected to hire private security, and private detectives and a private militia to defend their products.

If I remember correctly, this is indeed what the East India Trading Company did, before it was determined that it was in the public interest to defend private companies.

>There will be programs that run on general-purpose computers, and peripherals, that will freak even me out. So I can believe that people who advocate for limiting general-purpose computers will find a receptive audience. But just as we saw with the copyright wars, banning certain instructions, protocols or messages will be wholly ineffective as a means of prevention and remedy. As we saw in the copyright wars, all attempts at controlling PCs will converge on rootkits, and all attempts at controlling the Internet will converge on surveillance and censorship. This stuff matters because we've spent the last decade sending our best players out to fight what we thought was the final boss at the end of the game, but it turns out it's just been an end-level guardian. The stakes are only going to get higher.

This is the wrong framing. The creators have a right to do with their creation as they please. What you want is for them to have control over everyone else's rights to do things with that information. Now you are talking about restricting other people and the question should be why the creators should be able to do that.

With physical property the this is a lot clearer - only one person can posess a physical item so in order for one person to be able to own something you need to restrict other people. With information this is not the case - you can effortlessly copy information without the original owner having any less of it. The idea why we have copyright is instead that we need to incentivize the creation of content by making it easier for creators to profit off it. Now this is already questionable to begin with (people have always felt the urge to create long before any copyright laws), even if you agree with the premise you still need to justify all copyright laws with how they help achieve that goal.

> Frankly, it seems to me like if a studio wants to show their movie for $1000 dollars, only available on their windows phone app, geogated to just south east Arkansas, they should have every right to do that.

Why? What does society gain from granting them that right that would possibly justify restricting everyone else's right to free speech in order to accomplish this?

I don't need them to make the copy for me, and I don't need them to play the copy, so why should they control what I'm doing with my stuff?

They have no right to decide that I can only show my copy of it for $20 on an iphone.

What's actually right is to keep people free, not insist on arbitrary controls because the government has decided only one person is allowed to tell a certain story

The obvious collateral damage from creating the technology and legal frameworks to enforce this and their high abuse potential.

The whole point of legislation is to draw lines along slippery slopes, I would think that the potential for abuse exists in almost every law ever written.