That is only one side of the original deal. The other side was the furtherance of education.

“The trade is ‘you give up the right to copy, and in return the people who make the content can afford to keep doing it and give you a constant stream of new movies, music, tv shows, and books’.” But that being the case just how did people like Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and host of others make money from their works in the pre-copyright days after the inexpensive movable type press spread in Europe. And most of them didn’t have patrons. People created before and after the introduction of laws like copyright and patents laws. And humans, being human will continue to create should either disappear tomorrow.

I happen to support the concept of copyright, though not for corporate welfare as very little that copyright protects goes back to the creator unless the creator is already a superstar retains their own copyright for book publishing. Hell, until the death of Micheal Jackson Paul McCartney and John Lennon’s estate couldn’t get their hands on Northern Songs copyright on their music, the stuff they wrote which, among other things meant that when MJ needed money he licensed Beatle’s songs out for advertising until the advertiser suddenly discovered they weren’t selling more by using it they were in fact selling less because of enraged Boomers and other Beatle’s fans.

And you totally ignore that book publishers, and members of the RIAA and MPAA move heaven and earth and more to AVOID paying the creative parts of their industries with near or completely fraudulent accounting and a host of other “charges” to the creative part so they get to keep the profits themselves. None of this is new but you “for the artists” bleaters keep ignoring that well known fact.

And as the time things remain in copyright is, as noted, retroactively extended from time to time due the “we’re broke” fibs from the above it seems that it may never end.

“one day they will fall into the public domain – which is packed with a few thousand years worth of content going back in man’s history.” Maybe, but not if Hollywood can find new and more inventive ways of retelling those stories in the public domain with minor changers, perhaps sanitizing the ending thereby removing any lesson told to keep it happy and then, as Disney has been known to do threaten to sue anyone coming up with an adaptation of a story they’ve already adapted because “Disney owns the copyright now on Snow White, dammit!!” Or some record company records a minor variation on Messiah or some well known Opera and attempts to say not only do they own the variation they recorded but the title itself as Disney does.

People will create because that’s what people, and our species, does. Talented people will create by the shipload and find a way to get paid and supported for it as they did before copyright existed. Inventors will still invent as they did before patent law whose reason was to end things like trade secrets in exchange for a short monopoly on a thing not a lifetime pension for, say, the pharmaceutical industry or the creation of patent trolls a genus know as patent trolls who appear to have evolved in East Texas.

Note the use of the word SHORT. Not lifetime, not forever, not perpetual but SHORT.

It’s hard to support either when the basic understanding of the idea has become so corrupted that the understanding is either no longer in place or one side has decided to ignore it’s side of the deal.

As in most law. more often in common law than criminal law, the citizenry also has the right to say that “we’ve had enough of this crap and corruption so here and now we withdraw our support for this law as both the purpose and understanding when we agreed to copyright and patent are no longer observed unilaterally by those who sold us on the purpose and understanding. So SHOVE IT!.”

I strongly suggest that that’s what’s happening now. Hollywood has overplayed its hand this time around and what was already there when Valente went on his Tour of Lies in the early day of VCRs has now become a chorus and that chorus of dissent and withdrawal on permission by the other side of the contract has become louder.

Oh, and indeed part of the original contract with copyright as with patents is that after a SHORT time, the works would move into the public domain as otherwise copyright would fail in it’s prime goal of encouraging education. Points made in the preamble to the Statute of Queen Anne and the debates in Westminster as recorded in Hansard. That is the law that formed the genesis of American copyright law. So even then it was NOT intended as welfare for creators or those who feed on them such as publishers, recording companies and the motion picture industry.

You fail, AC. And really really badly.