Laws don't replace skill or talent
People believe the laws should reflect the interests of the society. They argue that copyright laws is important to incentive private parties to produce new content so that in the long term everyone will have access to a richer culture.
Maybe that was the original intent, but today it mostly serves to protect the distributor assets. Writers and musicians sell their rights to the publisher, who profit from the exclusive rights to distribute the content. Only a small percentage of the profit goes back to the artist in the form of royalties.
For the sake of the argument, let’s suppose the artist was able to earn his/her living only from the royalties received, which is not true for most cases. Is it fair that the single owner of the rights profit from it for such an extended time as 70 years after the author’s death, when other people could be creating more interesting stuff based on this work to entertain the rest of us?
Super protective laws will only incentive the mediocrity. We have to settle for “good enough”, when we could have access to great, improved versions of a work.
IMHO, the fact that laws get reinterpreted, twisted and extended whenever a major corporation’s asset (whose creators have died long ago) gets threatened is proof enough that the interests of living, mostly underpaid authors is never at consideration when those laws are discussed.
Lessig has a major point about it when he describes his battle against those extensions in Free Culture. And you have a major point regarding how we can improve the quality of works by getting rid of overprotective laws.
Here is an interesting interview with cartoonist Nina Paley about copyright restrictions: http://questioncopyright.org/nina_paley_sita_interview