The truth is that in the digital era, reproducing a music or book has practically zero cost, and even copying a full-resolution movie for a friend will cost pennies. Thus, the fair profit for a commercial publisher is nearly zero; which is another way of saying that the service that publishers were established to provide is now even less necessary than that of blacksmiths, heralds, and water carriers; and their copyright --- the exceptional privilege to perform such service --- would have been useless. If capitalism were allowed to work as Adam Smith assumed it would, publishers woul simply have gone out of business.
Instead, the publishers of books, movies and music have used their formidable financial power to pass laws that preserved their income, even though the "service" they provided is now wholly negative. Thus, the term "copyright" --- which was originally the exclusive privilege to make printed copies of books or stamped copied or records, for commercial purposes --- was redefined to encompass any copying, commercial or not; even if done among private individuals, in private settings, without commercial purposes. In other words, the publishers demanded to be paid for the mere enjoyment of the work, rather than for providing a service to the people who enjoyed it. At the same time, the period of said privilege was progressively extended, from "12 years since publication" to an absurd "70 years after the death of the author".
Finally, for the last few decades, they have been trying very hard (and all but succeeded) into turning that privilege into ownership of those works, by recasting "copyright" as a form of "intellectual property". The reason is obvious: a specific commercial right to copy can be clipped by fair use exceptions, and will eventually lapse, or be revoked; wheres property admits no fair use and never lapses. For those publishers, it is not enough to have the exclusive right to reproduce the work for almost a century: they want to charge for any "use" of it, forever.
The insatiable greed of the publishers is all the more revolting when one considers how they acquired those rights in the first place. In the best case, the contract by which the author ceded the copyright was good only for the period established by lawsat that time; the subsequent extensions, to the current "death+70" rule, were either forced retroactively on those original contracts, or were assumed by the publishers even without any backing contract. Thus we are now in the paradoxical situation that 80% of all movies, books and music produced in the last century is copyrighted, but has no identifiable author. That is, all those works are filling the pockets of "publishers" that do not publish, without a single cent being passed on to their real authors.
Copyright forces us to pay whenever we want to read, watch or listen to copyrighted works. If this was its only evil, it would not be so bad. If we could freely choose among all copyrighted works, and between them and copyright-free works, it would be all fair and fine, that capitalistic paradise called a "free market". If one publisher charged excessive royalties for a certain work, people would just choose other works with smaller or no royalties, until the royalties settled at their "fair market value".
However, as in other fields, unbridled capitalism has all but destroyed the free market for intellectual works. I already observed that the copyright system turns the market of each work into a monopoly. Now, with the excuse of copyright, the royalty industry has been removing non-commercial sites; since commercial sites have little incentive to carry free works, royalty enforcement has made it quite difficult to publish copyright-free works.Worse still, publishers use their money to build walls that prevent users from exercising their free choice, even among copyrighted works. In Brazil most cinemas are now owned by a few large corporations, that affiliated in one way or the other to specific giant global distributors; and therefore will show only the "products" which those distributors see fit to provide. Thus, today, in the age of global internet, moviegoers have considerable less choice than they had 50 years ago. Then, each movie theater could rent and show films from anywhere in the world --- Europe, Russia, China, Japan --- directly from the original producers; whereas today those films are available only through the handful of global publishers which "own" the Brazilian market. The same situation holds for TV programming (a single company provides all satellite TV content, even foreign TV channels like RAI and BBC), and even for books and magazines. The same situation apparently holds throughout the world. Well, this stranglehold on people's freedom of choice is only possible by the legal and finacial leverage provided by copyright legistation.
For all of the above, the concept of copyright as currently understood, and all the attached and derived perversions --- author's right, royalties, intellectual properties, exclusivity contracts --- are evils that must be abolished. As in may other matters of rights, there is no room for compromise, for limited copyrights: as history has shown, once we give to certain people the power to control the flow of information, they will use that power to extend and harden their control, until the world will get back to its present state of intellectual slavery and colonization. If the word "copyright" is to be retained, it should be redefined as a completely opposite concept, a fundamental human right: Every human has the right to make a copy of any information he has the right to access, free from conditions, royalties, censorship, discrimination, whether by the author, by the owner of material objects bein copied, or any thrid parties, including (and especially) the government and its agents.
Abolishment the copyright would be a total upheaval of the cultural scene, one of the greatest spiritual revolutions of all times; comparable to the invention of the printing press, the telephone, and the internet. It would be as momentous for the intellectual freedoms as the French Revolution was for the material and social human rights. It would make the human mind free, as it has not been for almost 500 years.
What would we lose? The royalty industry claims that, without copyright, there would be no high-quality records, no great books, no blockbuster movies like Start Wars and Harry Potter. Even if they are right, we must ask: do we really need such works, so badly? Does having 20 new blockbuster movie every summer justify requiring everyone to obtain permission from middlemen in order to perform, copy, mix, edit and redistribute works that they like? (Not to mention sending a kid to prison for sharing a movie with his friends?) If there had not been any Start Wars movies or Elvis Presley records, would our world be pooreer, our lives sadder, our future less promising?
But, in fact, without copyright we may in fact have more and better movies, more and better records, more and better songs. The Encyclopedia Britannica is an egregious example of a high-quality book that actually does massive good to mankind. Barely eight years ago, it was "obvious" that the Encyclopedia Britannica would not exist without copyright. Yet, contrary to all "common sense", an army of volunteers built Wikipedia --- which is now much larger, more complete, and more detailed than the Britannica --- in a fraction of the time, without the supposedly indispensable incentive of author rights and publisher copyright. Quite the contrary, Wikipedia would have been a failure had it been encumbered with such fetters. Indeed, Wikipedia has done the world a thousand times more good than the Britannica, precisely for being available for free.
I have no hope that this revolution will pass before I die, but I do hope my descendants and their friends will one day be able to experience that world. Let all of us who want a better world fight towards that end.