When considering the future of copyright (if indeed copyright has a future) it should be remembered that its perceived purpose was to allow artists to get paid. Historically it never did that job very well as most people party to a recording or publishing deal will testify.

Paying creative individuals for their work makes sense. Society wants their output and creatives want to give it. In order to allow them to work professionally and follow the dictates of the muse then funding needs to come from some source. The copyright system was supposed to perform this task but it tended to succeed only in rendering wealthy a small coterie of the fortunate. These were the hit-makers and the agencies and corporate moguls that supported them. In this sense the old system was quasi-medieval in its structures: the few amassed wealth while the many lived in poverty.

In recent years copyright has been blown apart by the Internet and revision is underway. Whatever form that revision takes it should be about focussing on the objective of financing art. If a work is sufficiently successful then the creator needs to be rewarded commensurate with that success and be able to keep on working. Artists can then do what they do as a career choice.

The immediate question is how do we compensate creative people and allow them to remain solvent. Not how do we ensure multi-national corporations, the people who run them, and a handful of fabulously affluent artists maintain themselves in medieval lavish.