My point is none of the reasons that copyright ever seemed like a reasonable idea at the time have actually changed, and so if it was pragmatic then, it is no less pragmatic today. I would argue that there is a moral obligation to respect such a pragmatic compromise, since the very reason it was ever devised in the first place was with the goal of trying to enrich society. Even if its goal has been "twisted", as you allege (and I do not refute), if they were correct about that goal then, in that published works somehow *did* enrich society, then that point should be no less true today than it was when copyright was invented.
And on the subject of copyright giving people the option to rent-seek, which you mentioned above... not all copyrighted works are for monetary gain. If, again, public domain is such a viable alternative to copyright when monetary compensation is not being sought, what incentive do people who copyright under BSD terms or many other types of open source licenses (other than the GPL, which explicitly forbids copying to anyone who, in action, disagrees with the terms of the license) have to bother explicitly copyrighting their works and attaching their name to it when they could, with no less effort, put a disclaimer stating the work was simply domain? I would argue that the fact that more works intended to be freely available are *not* being put into public domain, but are almost invariably explicitly put under some copyright terms such as a BSD license or what have you suggests to me that the dissolution of copyright would result in fewer published works other than those of the caliber that people put into public domain today, which tends to set a pretty low bar for quality, and thus does not particularly enrich society to the same extent that copyrighted works otherwise would have. This is fundamentally why I maintain that respecting copyright is a moral decision, and not just a legal one. I'll admit that this suggestion is only my opinion based on what I interpret from the presently available observable data, but do you have any actually observable evidence to support a contrary position?
Also bear in mind that I don't refute people put stuff into public domain today, and that there's not even a particularly small amount of it.... some of it is even actually pretty good. The average caliber, however, tends to be considerably lower than even the freely available copyrighted works, which are also far more abundant. I feel in the absence of copyright, therefore, all we would be left with is a smaller stream of published content of about the same quality as currently published public domain works, which is what I think would lead to societal stagnation, and again, why I think that respecting copyright has moral weight to it unless one's morals do not advocate supporting a mechanism that benefits society (I do not allege that is your position, only that I acknowledge that there may be some who would hold such a position, and there is no point at which I would ever expect to be able to convince one who held such a position that copyright had any moral value whatsoever).
And on the question I posed above, and sticking just to content that is legally freely available so as to just compare apples to apples here, do you have any evidence to show that a significant percentage of public domain content is actually of higher caliber than content that may be no less freely available than open source content, for instance, but is usually explicitly copyrighted? This isn't a rhetorical question.... I ask it because I've attempted to present the evidence that I believe supports my position, and I am genuinely oblivious to evidence that contradicts it. I don't allege that the monetary stranglehold that copyright seems to offer the content publishers may be a morally bankrupt tenet, but if published works still somehow enriches society, as I allege that it does, then that moral bankruptcy is actually irrelevant to the still-existing underlying benefit of published works. I don't advocate that the ends justify the means, but I *do* advocate that if bad intentions can still produce good results, particularly when those results were the original intent in the first place, then those good results, and even the original good intentions, are not somehow made any less good just because of any currently existing bad intentions unless one can somehow show that the original intentions are simply no longer applicable in this day and age. I believe that publishers who may have morally invalid reasons for doing what they do are responsible for their own moral decisions and must bear the consequences of those, something for which neither you nor I have, or should have, any responsibility for. The benefits of published content seem to remain despite the existence of such goals, and in turn, the underlying benefit of copyright. If one would actually advocate the dissolution of copyright then it is of critical importance to somehow illustrate that the absence of copyright would result in no fewer published works of respectable quality that could continue to enrich society. Do you have such evidence? If one agrees that copyright still serves at least some of the same purpose for which it was originally created, however pragmatic a compromise that might have been when it was invented, then in what way is it not a moral obligation on the part of a good citizen to advocate the unadulterated support of mechanisms that enrich society, and to deeply criticize actions which might undermine those mechanism?
