It is one thing to demand a restoration of basic reason to government policy, and quite another to demand it simultaneously on all fronts. I cannot, therefore, blame the government for moving ahead on a "copyright czar" despite the issue being a virtual non-priority. Intellectual property law as it exists is already 100% on the side of industry, and there is at least a solid foundation of rationality behind the principle, so demanding a more nuanced approach in the face of that much lobbying money - with little more than anarchists and college students in opposition - is perhaps a bridge too far.
Nonetheless, I would like to make the argument that rigid enforcement of virtually perpetual copyright is a bigger problem than infringement of common sense IP, and is quite likely a contributing factor in piracy. Miserliness does not create respect for property rights - in fact, it pisses people off, and makes them feel that property is just an exercise of power against the powerless. Despite the views of some left-wing philosophies, this need not be the case.
I. History
United States Constitution, Section 8, Clause 8 (emphasis mine):
The Congress shall have power to...promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
This makes perfect sense as a general principle: To incentivize the creation of original works of art and technical inventions, the originators are granted legal authority to negotiate for and benefit financially from their use. However, the Founders recognized that there is a point of diminishing returns beyond which there is little or no additional public benefit from the continuation of these rights, so they explicitly stated that the term of patent/copyright be limited. The meaning of "limited," unfortunately, seems to have become one of the many constitutional stipulations that have been frittered away into meaninglessness.
Copyright terms have been extended not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, but five times, for a combined extension of roughly an order of magnitude (factor of ten). In 1790, the term of copyright was 14 years with the possibility of one 14-year renewal if and only if the author was alive. By 1998, with the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, copyright terms are now the lifetime of the author plus 70 years - for someone of average lifespan, about 150 years. With copyrights this long, having this much economic power behind them, it's questionable whether they will ever be allowed to expire.
Wikipedia has a handy graphic by Tom Bell illustrating the continual process of term extensions over the years. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to agree with Flickr, so I've had to derive a slightly different image from the information it contains and give attribution based on the Creative Commons Share Alike license attached to the image:
The terms listed in the graphic are only approximate, since obviously an author might have an abnormally long lifespan. If a 15-year-old were granted a copyright today and lived for 115 years, the copyright wouldn't expire until 2179 - assuming the trend of ever-increasing copyright terms failed to continue even once in the ensuing 170 years. Now, real individuals have virtually zero use for such extreme terms - most people would be quite happy to get reasonably rich and gain recognition, and not begrudge society the right to build on their work. But there are immortal legal entities that find perpetual copyright very lucrative - you guessed it: Corporations.
In our infinite wisdom, we have created systems that embody what in ancient times would have been called demons: Immortal, parasitic, morally devoid creatures driven by a blind desire to control and consume at all cost to mankind, even if it means their own ultimate extinction. Once they have outlived the entrepreneurial vision that originally made them a going concern, it's questionable whether corporations contribute more than they consume to survive. What is far less questionable, however, is that large, successful corporations are seldom creative - rather, they survive on economic inertia, support for political conservatism to protect themselves from change, and predation of good ideas that might threaten their bottom line.
II. Nature of creativity
Very few classic works are truly original: Authors are usually inspired by, or even blatantly rip off earlier works. Imagine if William Shakespeare had been required to obtain permission from a litany of corporations that each owned the rights to Plutarch, Tacitus, Hesiod, Caesar, and every other ancient poet, historian, or renowned figure whose characters or events he borrowed. Imagine if Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle had been forced to go through lengthy and costly negotiations with the owners of every penny dreadful whose cliched storylines they read and turned into brilliant works of genius for the ages.
Now imagine that every...single...time their works were adapted or borrowed by others, another round of costly negotiations had to take place: How much of the cultural legacy of modern civilization would simply never have occurred? I dare say most of it. Copyright law as it exists today is not fashioned to protect and incentivize creators, but to perpetually enrich corporate copyright holders and deter future creativity that might dilute the value of their purchase over extreme time scales.
III. Contrast with patent law
But this isn't just a question of artists vs. corporations: Another, and probably more valuable form of creativity was also intended for protection under the Copyright Clause of the US Constitution: Physical inventions. These are the machines, technologies, and processes that power our world, store information, move people and goods across the globe, and creatively harness the laws of physics and material properties to enhance the potential of mankind.
Since 1995, the term of a patent under most circumstances is 20 years, with conditional extensions possible - an eminently reasonable term, as far as I'm concerned. But in light of copyright law, let's consider a hypothetical reductio ad absurdum case: I am an obsessed researcher who has spent my entire life working toward Invention X. I've gone through several marriages, my children don't know me, I have no friends, and I have accomplished nothing other than Invention X, and it is utterly, shatteringly brilliant by universal acclaim.
Let's say it takes me 5 years after the patent is granted to commercialize it, and another 5 years to really catch on. Assuming I'm not so deep in debt that I have to sell it at firesale prices to a large corporation, maybe I get comfortably rich over the next decade before the patent expires and everyone can benefit: All well and good.
Now imagine some walking penis from a shallow gene pool gets drunk and decides to record himself singing "My Fair Lady" to the sound of his own farts. It is disturbingly not a Big If whether anyone would pay to hear that, so this extraordinary contribution to humanity would not only be his to profit from for the rest of his life, but could conceivably be enriching his great-great-grandchildren while the descendants of Inventor X aren't even aware of their lineage, let alone profiting from it.
For the next century-and-change, entire generations of double-digit IQs could sue anyone else who had the brilliant idea to record themselves singing to a fart soundtrack and demand royalties. Under current punitive laws against digital piracy, anyone who copied this work of genius could be sent to jail, their assets confiscated, and more money than they will make in their entire lives demanded of them as a fine. But, of course, that's assuming the criminal infringement law doesn't become even more draconian.
It is precisely the relative lack of effort and risk in artistic creation compared to physical invention that allows the former to be so much more profitable on the whole, and thus to have more resources at its disposal to lobby for disproportionate legal protection. I think current patent law is reasonable, but copyright law is egregiously out of whack: It creates hereditary dynasties out of intellectual property, and makes all elements of culture that arise from it the perpetual feudal domain of corporations - like IP black holes, the entities where all copyrights ultimately end up.
UV. Conclusions
Copyrights should be long enough to incentivize creation, and short enough to facilitate community elaboration. Ten years is long enough to benefit financially from an artistic work; twenty years is generous; lifetime is extreme; lifetime plus 70 years is fucking outrageous. When copyright law is continually extended just so that twisted corporations like Disney, Warner Bros., etc. can keep milking the creations of dead men in perpetuity, people lose respect for the concept of intellectual property.
People begin to feel that what the law deems "piracy" is only a natural expression of community being unnaturally suppressed by entrenched power - a bad development, as it also undermines respect for even common sense versions of the principle. As movie studios prosecute people for file sharing films that were released in their grandparents' childhood, and record companies drag people to court for copying music that predated the studios themselves, an attitude of tolerance for copyright infringement evolves, and a self-sustaining community grows around that attitude.
Standards of any kind would be difficult or impossible to enforce within such a community, so the net result is that even new creations by new artists with no financial power are preyed upon: The worst of both worlds. Powerful, ultra-wealthy, immortal corporations that add nothing have perpetual copyright that they enforce through the bludgeon of criminal prosecution, and struggling artists without the resources to enforce their rights are ripped to pieces before they can capitalize on their creations.
Some progress has been made with different business models, such as streaming music and video sources that treat entertainment as a utility rather than a product, and the services purchase the rights so that people can enjoy the output freely. There has also been progress through the advent of commons licenses such as GNU and CC. But the problem remains: Vast segments of our cultural legacy, if not the majority, have been walled off into feudal kingdoms where people are only allowed to build on them by paying every corporate highwayman who sets up a tollbooth in the way.
Due to these facts, I find myself leaning toward ethical flexibility on copyright law. Will I pay to see a new movie or hear a new song? Absolutely. Will I pay to see a movie or hear a song whose creators would still benefit from it? Perhaps. Would I pay to see a movie or hear a song that my grandfather knew as a teenager, just to enrich the umpteenth corporate property-squatter who happens to have speculated on the value of the copyright? Fuck no, and most people would agree: The sponsors of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act knew most people wouldn't accept such a preposterous requirement, so they limited the applicability to works copyrighted after 1978. In other words, they're counting on the slow erosion of memory to enact their agenda, so that future generations grow up assuming that copyrights are perpetual.
This is totally unacceptable. The Constitution says that copyrights are of limited duration, but that is not the case if they are extended every time their endpoint approaches. As with all matters of politics, law ultimately rests in the acceptance of the people that something is just - and while this is hardly a Big Deal insofar as other matters of justice are concerned, I don't think many people would agree that lifetime plus 70 years is reasonable.
But again, I fully understand the government's total lack of resistance to copyright extension and punitive escalation against infringement - there is virtually no public pressure against it, and vast resources arrayed in favor of it. The best we can do, I think, is reinstate progressive taxation, tighten campaign finance laws, and the problem should at least be neutralized (i.e., further extensions curtailed) if not fully solved.