Politicians usually update our laws to catch up to technology by banning, restricting, or regulating it. That's not entirely fair. For example, here in the UK,

Politicians usually update our laws to catch up to technology by banning, restricting, or regulating it. That's not entirely fair. For example, here in the UK, the government did try to reform copyright to some extent by introducing a private copying exception in 2014. This was several years later than it should have been and followed multiple extensive official reviews of IP laws, but at least they got there. The exception was reasonably clear and quite tightly defined. Roughly speaking, it legalised actions like format shifting, making backup copies, and storing content on cloud services, provided they were for the personal, non-commercial use of someone who already had a legitimate permanent copy of that work. By modern political standards it was remarkable for following the original spirit of copyright so clearly: an individual would be free to enjoy a work they had lawfully obtained, including taking advantage of modern technologies, but the basic principle of copyright that the individual could not duplicate the work to share it with others was also maintained. That law was overturned less than a year later following a judicial review, based on technicalities of EU law particularly around compensation for rightsholders. There are a lot of things wrong with this situation, but in any case it is now abundantly clear that the EU authorities are heavily pro-big-copyright and have no qualms about using their influence to block progressive reforms or anything else that might be a threat to big rightsholders. They have repeatedly interfered both with member states' national governments, as in this case among others, but also on the world stage with organisations like the WIPO, from promoting longer copyright terms (again, contrary to overwhelming public opinion in evidence given to the official reviews) to blocking plans to ease restrictions on libraries so they can perform their public function. So yes, unfortunately some politicians seem to have completely lost the plot here, but not all of them. Of course, in the particular case I mentioned, the power structure is about to change between the UK and EU authorities, so hopefully whatever deal gets worked out over Brexit will at least escape that particular unwanted interference.