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There's a pretty big difference in apple pie and music or ebooks. Apple pie is a physical thing. Music and ebooks are not.
In the days when music came on LP or CD or cassettes and books came on paper the medium was physical and could be resold or kept and that was that. Then came computers and later MP3 files which could easily be copied and redistributed. There was nothing physical anymore. It became something new and different.
Copyright in the days of physical media made sense on the face of it. Copyright in these days of ephemeral media is a very different animal. You're correct that our current system doesn't cover current media very well. Much of it makes no sense. It's overly complex and getting more so as changes are made to try to adapt law to constantly changing media.
Today there are so many huge problems with the copyright system that anyone who has an emotional attachment to it is a bit balmy. And yet it sort of works to protect content much of the time because most of us agree that something is needed and it's all we have so we try to abide by it.
Any emotional attachment to this mish-mosh is a bit obsessive. I think most of us can agree that it's important but it's also pretty ugly. If we're going to make it any better we have to stop loving it and start thinking more clearly about it.
Barry
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