Copyright discourages originality, due to the fact that originality comes from distinguishing from what exists, which is what copyright inhibits.

Originality has nothing to do with making a culture better, but somehow you think otherwise.

Another way it limits culture is the fact that musical composition is not a limitless medium. Only certain key combination sounds pleasant, and even some of those sound similar enough to be considered infringing. If you consider all the music produced over the last hundred years, how much of the scope of music has been copyrighted? There is a professor at my University that is studying that concept, and he thinks that music has either reached its limit of permutations, or is about to reach it. His research is to find new ways of composing music to create a new genre. Tried finding the article, but I can't seem to find it on my schools website.

Furthermore, copyright creates centralized control. Before mandatory fees for radio play, artist could defer their fees to encourage radio play. When the big 4 first lobbied for the law, it was going to be that artist could opt in or out of the program. When they realized this would lead to their artist not getting any airplay, they set forth to make it mandatory and won. Now all you hear on the radio is big 4 music, where as without the copyright laws you would have a more vast array of music played.

There are others, but as I doubt you will take the time to absorb my argument I'll just leave it at that.

But I do agree, that for a certain period of time people should be allowed to profit from their work, and if other profit they should have to pay. But I think even the degree to which the law covers those aspects is grossly overdone. But I agree with what you said for the most part, just disagree when it comes to specifics of the argument.

If you start using the movies influence society and culture in a meaningful way argument then you open the door for many movies to be outlawed because of negative effects on society as well, which is silly. For that argument to even hold water you have to believe that watching movies is also a God Given right. Movies in general are a HUGE waste of time ( so is rap music for that matter ) and people could be doing a lot of things better in life than sitting on their butts watching "Dude Wheres My Car?" so if stoners are gonna waste societies time by sitting around doing nothing, watching BS, then the people who worked hard making that crap should get paid for actually working for a living to entertain the masses.

The law should protect the working man in every way possible when it comes to some people taking money away from the ones who provide us with entertainment. Like SoulXTC said, there is a HUGE difference between commercial and noncommercial piracy. Many forms of entertainment can probably profit MORE from P2P exposure while others can be hurt from it but all the people who burn the movies they download and sell them at work should have to either share their profits with the copyright owners or pay society by being arrested and fined $$$.