I’ve been reading Copyright Unbalanced lately, and it gives a pretty good description of what copyright is for and why it’s important:
Like all other forms of property, copyright exists to address an externality problem. Because the author of a creative work, such as a song, cannot exclude others from the benefits her work creates, authors who publish works are creating a positive externality. The problem is that if authors can’t internalize at least some of the positive externality they produce, then they will have only a weak incentive to create and publish works. Put another way, if authors have no way to exclude others from enjoying their works, and therefore can’t charge users for access, then they won’t produce as many works as they otherwise would, making everyone worse off. Copyright addresses this externality problem by creating a legal right to exclude others from enjoying the work without the author’s permission. If authors can sell permission for money, they can capture a higher proportion of the benefits they create, and their incentive to produce creative works in the first place will increase.
The book also goes over many of the things that are wrong with copright as it’s currently implemented in this country. I was especially interested in this tidbit:
Congress is supposed to represent the public’s interest, but it has abdicated that responsibility. As Jessica Litman has carefully documented, Congress has turned over the responsibility of crafting copyright law to the representatives of copyright-affected industries.13 That is, lobbyists write the copyright laws—not just figuratively, but literally.
For more than 100 years, copyright statutes have not been forged by members of Congress and their staff, but by industry, union, and library representatives who meet (often convened by the Copyright Office) to negotiate the language of new copyright legislation. As Litman explains, “When all the lobbyists have worked out their disagreements and arrived at language they can all live with … they give it to Congress and Congress passes the bill, often by unanimous consent.”
So to sum up, copyright was created to benefit the public by making artists more willing to create. It then got taken over by the artists(or more specifically, the marketers and labels) who pushed to have it extended beyond any reasonable benefit to society. The current state of affairs is pretty sad.