>Copyright is a monopoly that the government creates on purpose.
Copyright doesn't just protect profit-generation with the property - it also ensures the original material is not altered over time.
Alas, this is a very useful function of copyright and basically ensures that good works remain good, and don't get easily subverted.
In this day and age, though, we've evolved better methods to ensure this alteration of original content doesn't have a negative impact (whether on the profit-making or indeed on behalf of the final user of the material).
Governments could shift from enforcing the copyright monopoly, to providing an open, public, free fingerprinting service - akin to a PKI for all content - which would allow entitites to copy materials, but also allow individuals to verify immutable materials.
>We shouldn't be handing out generational monopolies willy-nilly.
Agreed. We should, though, be making sure the end-date is set for 'verified materials' to a period appropriate for re-verification by human means ...
Copyright does no such thing. The copyright owner is free to alter or change their material at any time, or to discard it and force it to remain unused until it deteriorates and is destroyed (e.g. video game preservation is mostly done by copyright violators).
Of course it does, don't be myopic.
There is a very good reason that we all read the same copy of Orwells' 1984: because the copyright was enforced to ensure the work was not altered. This is ++good.
That the originator/owner of the copyright is still able to assert agency over their works is the end result of copyright being used effectively. That some choose to end the lifetime of their works, an entirely acceptable result of the policy mechanism.
I still maintain that its utility in preserving works outweighs the history of works being lost due to originator/owner agency. I concur, however, that there are better ways to accomplish this in this day and age ... information does want to be free, after all.
A public fingerprinting/attestation service would separate the two functions we care about: 1) letting creators monetise and control commercial exploitation for a limited time, and 2) giving everyone a reliable way to verify that a given copy matches a claimed original.
The second does not require a multi-generational monopoly, and I am not advocating for that. I do however believe that some social mechanism for ensuring the materials I care about land on my desk un-altered, is quite important.
Copyright doesn't protect a work, there's probably also a reasonable argument that exact reproduction of a work is overrated in the first place. Others could just as easily produce a verbatim copy of 1984 if there wasn't copyright. The original theatrical release of Star Wars is almost impossible to find because Lucas altered it several times. Copyright isn't protecting the work, it's letting the holders exploit a rerelease 50 years after the initial release.
1984 has been out of copyright in most of the world for 6 years and that, if anything, has made it easier to find an unmodified copy.