I was with you a few comments back, and I think I agree with your overall direction, but in nitpick land, I think the details of your argument have gone off the

I was with you a few comments back, and I think I agree with your overall direction, but in nitpick land, I think the details of your argument have gone off the rails a little, here. I think it's not clear that "society" "wants" copyright to exist. Society, or at least the collection of individuals composing society, is pretty clearly conflicted on the subject. People want to retain creative control over their own work, to a degree that is clearly insane and impossible. And simultaneously people (some of the same people!) want to be allowed to do whatever they feel like with the works of others, to a degree that is... dubious. The sum of these positions is not clear. And in any case, the legal status quo does not derive from any such sum. It derives largely from Disney's lobbying, as you acknowledged. And in fact, what society does about statuses quo is not "take the bad with the good", and "try to change the law". Historically, that's not how the law gets updated. I'm not personally drawing an equivalence between copyvio and e.g. slavery or e.g. marijuana policy or e.g. religious intolerance... but hopefully those examples will demonstrate that in most cases the law follows popular sentiment and disobedience, not leads.