"The copyright model and the arts have thrived for the last few centuries because copyright was such a vast improvement on what came before it. It led to an exp

"The copyright model and the arts have thrived for the last few centuries because copyright was such a vast improvement on what came before it. It led to an explosion of creativity and entertainment industry." You keep saying this and I keep not believing that that's all there was to it. It was also a matter of people having way more disposable income and leisure time than ever before, as well as the means of production becoming readily available to the masses. You're also mostly talking about an era during which the marginal cost of distribution was significantly greater than zero. That's not the case anymore. "our worry should be ensuring that artists and the creative industries have economically viable roles" I disagree with this. I think most of our enduring works of art come from a time before copyright. Some, e.g. works of oral tradition like Homer, the Ramayana, the Bible, Gilgamesh, etc. actually depend on the unrestricted free exchange of ideas. We just passed through a historical window in which the confluence of surplus disposable income and leisure and scarce distribution models made a few artists very rich (but a few corporations even richer). I would argue that this was never an optimal distribution. Anyway, it's coming to a close. Art will go on. "And do we really want to live in a world where the quality of the TV and film output never rises above the level of, say, Spain?" The only Spanish works I'm familiar with are Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone and various films by Pedro Almodovar. They were better than anything on, for example, this list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#Most_expensive_productions_.28adjusted_for_inflation.29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_expensive_films#Mo...