Terence Hart is brilliant. If you don’t follow his blog copyhype.com, you should. His most recent post serves as a wonderful reminder of why copyright is important not just to the individual “author” but to society as a whole. I am particularly struck by the A. Kaminstein quote about half-way down. In part, it reads:
[…] ironically, in seeking to make the author’s works widely available by freeing them from copyright restrictions, they fail to realize that they are whittling away the very thing that nurtures authorship in the first place.
You are an artist, the maker of culture and society. Copyright is the tool that makes that possible.