The legal system doesn't work. Or more accurately, it doesn't work for anyone except those with the most resources. Not because the system is corrupt. I don't think our legal system (at the federal level, at least) is at all corrupt. I mean simply because the costs of our legal system are so astonishingly high that justice can practically never be done.

Copyright law has got to give up its obsession with 'the copy.' The law should not regulate 'copies' or 'modern reproductions' on their own. It should instead regulate uses--like public distributions of copies of copyrighted work--that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster.

Companies will often use the legal system to scare people away from attacking them. But we all should be free to make critical statements about anybody, unless those statements are malicious.

We are a cut-and-paste culture. The aim of the protectionists is to argue that a cut-and-paste culture is criminal. Well, it's only criminal if there's nothing out there that you can freely cut and paste. If we increasingly mark material as available for these non-commercial uses, then people will have the opportunity to see its importance.

If the Internet teaches us anything, it is that great value comes from leaving core resources in a commons, where they're free for people to build upon as they see fit.

All of the great Disney works took works that were in the public domain and remixed them.

This does not mean that every copyright must prove its value initially. That would be a far too cumbersome system of control. But it does mean that every system or category of copyright or patent should prove its worth.