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Copyright law was created for the following reasons:
1. The arts are a public good, the creation of which should be encouraged;
2. Because the arts are a public good, the creators of art should be remunerated for their work, thus motivating them to produce it, and more of it.
That's it. The idea that the creator of art has control of what happens to their work is simply a mechanism to ensure that the creators are compensated for their work. Once an idea--or art--is released into the wild, it takes on a life of its own.
My concern is that current copyright law concentrates on the mechanism to the near-exclusion of the first principle.
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