It's always felt like a fundamental flaw in copyright to me, though, if as implemented it discourages the legal dissemination of content. At the start a 14 yea

It's always felt like a fundamental flaw in copyright to me, though, if as implemented it discourages the legal dissemination of content. At the start a 14 year copyright term (+ 14 if author was still alive and chose to renew) was considered sufficient in the U.S.; these days, it's life + 70 years. And copyrights are recognized (more or less) internationally, and we live in a time when nothing has to go out of print and most copyrighted material can be paid for and delivered over the Internet rather than cranked out on a printing press and carried by horse into the territories. In other words, routinely creating artificial scarcity strikes me as a relatively modern usage of copyright protection -- there might have been the odd case where somebody only wanted to produce five books or something, but as a matter of course it seemed like authors wanted to get their material out there. Things seemed fairly hunky-dory until copyright terms got extended, publishers and movie studios began amassing libraries of content, and alternative strategies to simply publishing content to meet demand became viable. If nothing else, it seems weird to me that a radio station can go out, buy an album, pay set royalties to the appropriate organizations, and be clear to broadcast or stream... yet the equivalent does not exist for streaming audiovisual content.