The main problem is here the ease of duplication. You have here a commodity where nearly all the cost of its creation is fixed. Per unit costs are negligible, and duplication of a unit is trivial. If you are allowed to duplicate and distribute the unit you paid for, depending on the total market there is actually the danger that the maker cannot sell many units, resulting in you having to pay for the total production cost, or market forces dictate that this commodity cannot be produced anymore due to higher cost than benefit.
In a nutshell, if you can copy as you please, people whose income depends on producing content will stop doing so.
We could now start a debate whether that would actually be a good thing when people start creating content (or, if you please, art) out of love instead of base desires like money. One thing would still remain, anything where production takes many years and costs lots of money will not be produced anymore. There would be no blockbuster movies and no AAA games. And yes, again, it's debatable whether that would actually be a bad thing.
What I can agree with is that copyright has gone out of hand. That's true. We're now at the insanity of the lifetime of the author plus 70 years. In other words, it's unlikely that the works of the Beatles, which were created half a century ago, will go into PD before I die. That's essentially copyright for over a century. Copyright originally was meant to give a creator an incentive to create, so he could recover his expenses and reap the rewards for his art. But where is the incentive if I can milk a single hit forever?
Original copyright was 7 years. And back then, that was pretty tight. 7 years was not a lot of time for an aspiring artist to get his book printed and sold. Some managed to get into a second issue and still earn royalties for that, but usually, especially for young artists, those 7 years went by VERY quickly. Back then it took a lot of time to get a book edited, printed and distributed. Advertising was WAY slower (and less efficient) than today, and by the time most people actually learned of the book and wanted to buy it, copyright was expired, other editors printed copies and the original author got jack.
And that's when copyright went bananas. Today, we have INSANELY long copyrights while at the same time the time from conception to distribution can be measured in days. Hours sometimes, even. That simply makes no sense anymore.
So I do not agree that I should be allowed to do "whatever I want" with the work. I should be allowed nearly everything, in this we can agree. I should be allowed to use it however I please, view and listen to it in whatever fashion I please and if I do not want to use it anymore I should be allowed and able to sell it. I should not be allowed to duplicate and distribute it, though, at least for a sensible period. The original 7 years sounded very sensible and I think reducing copyright to this 7 years would allow copyright to become again what it was meant to be: A tool to balance the interests of creators and consumers of content.
