The copyright issue is at an edge of what allows the the market to work.
Until the internet, maximizing profit and maximizing value was more or less the same thing. That's not true anymore : when I copy something I'm actually creating value while destroying profit. The only way to do maintain profit is to create scarcity and define prices artificially as the most people would pay for it.
The ability to create copy of things at no cost is a kind of a miracle when you look at it. The issue is that the market doesn't seem to work well with limitless resources. Totally fixing piracy would require a market that can work for unlimited resources, but we have nothing of that kind yet ; it could be something like wuffies (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom ). Read it if you want to experiment what a society with limitless resources could look like.
This so succinctly describes the problem that I created an account just to upvote you.
These laws are essentially fabricating scarcity - the medium has /solved/ the distribution problem, so of course anyone with an interest in monopolising distribution would try to stymie it.
This reminds me tangentially of software developers - especially iOS devs (of which I am one) - who get upset when their apps are cloned. It only seems unfair to those devs because they refuse to evolve with the available technology. You just don't make profits in the same way anymore. You want to take advantage of simple free distribution, but of course you don't want it to be TOO free!
Creating digital copies is not free. It requires computing resources, connectivity, and electricity, all of which we pay for.
I don't think the issue of digital copying is as revolutionary as we all like to think it is. I think we can look at it as another step on the long trek of using automation to reduce content production costs--a trek which began with the advent of the printing press. That was when the legal concept of copyright originated--which, for historical context, was the time of Newton.
If you had a printing press back then, the cost of reproduction was reduced essentially to the commodity costs of paper and ink, plus the time to configure the copying.
Fast forward to today. If you have a computer, the cost of reproduction has now been reduced to the commodity costs of electricity, fractional hard drive cost, and bandwidth, plus the time to configure the copy. Granted, those costs are way, way lower than a printing press 300 years ago. But to me at least that seems like a matter of degree than some fundamental difference.
Until the internet, maximizing profit and maximizing value was more or less the same thing. That's not true anymore : when I copy something I'm actually creating value while destroying profit. The only way to do maintain profit is to create scarcity and define prices artificially as the most people would pay for it.
The ability to create copy of things at no cost is a kind of a miracle when you look at it. The issue is that the market doesn't seem to work well with limitless resources. Totally fixing piracy would require a market that can work for unlimited resources, but we have nothing of that kind yet ; it could be something like wuffies (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom ). Read it if you want to experiment what a society with limitless resources could look like.
Not saying that this is the solution still.