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Personally, I think it's even funnier that a group that started out by fighting patents and copyrights, now maintain themselves by staunchly defending those patents and copyrights, and having the laws rewritten to uphold their copyrights beyond their original limits.
Hollywood isn't the only commercial entity that started out as independent, fighting the system in order to create what they wanted, and eventually ended up as closed and commercial as the entities they originally fought against. In fact, a number of the publishers that are mentioned around these parts have a similar history.
It might be arguable how much copyright hindered the early independents, but to an extent, it was doing exactly what it was designed to do, which was to keep others from profiting from some one else's ideas. Let's face it, everyone would like to be able to sell a great product, but it should not be fair for Citizen A to simply steal the idea from Citizen B who spent a lot of time and effort developing something unique and valuable. Restricting access to Citizen A, or requiring Citizen A to compensate Citizen B, for a limited period of time, is a fair practice.
That's in theory, obviously. As the article pointed out, the courts decided against the standing copyright laws later, and changed the status quo in early cinema (a sign that our present copyright state isn't carved in stone), opening more opportunities for commerce and competition. The laws should always be balanced to allow early compensation, then encourage competition, without allowing a perpetual monopoly to dominate the market.
And most importantly, the laws have to be written with the understanding that times change, needs change, technology changes, and the laws must be capable of changing to keep up.
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