The concepts of copyright and patent are very much 20th century ones.

The idea of trying to control "copies" made sense when you had to have expensive equipment to make the copies and the idea of allowing people to hold control over the new inventions made sense when you didn't have a way for everyone to communicate.

But we don't live in the 20th century anymore.

What we see now is that in the US companies try and keep copyrights alive "forever" (just look at how many years they keep extending the time frame for copyright on music) and with patents many corporations are able to just "stifle" any development of new ideas (which was supposed to be the very point of patents) which is why it has taken so long for many alternative energy technologies to even appear.

We don't need these "artifacts of the past" as we have "crowd funding" and "crowd sourcing" to get things done much more efficiently.

Let's stop supporting antiquated ideas and start pushing forward some new thinking (this is the space that Bitcoin is a big part of).