What he is saying is that the output from artists and the resulting copyrights has next to no value when compared with the value of the internet. I tend to agree, people will still make music even if they cant easily profit from it, yet if we lose the internet we are back in the stone age of communication. So what if a few special interest groups pay the price via a failed business model, empires rise and fall as it has always been and will continue to be.
Losing the internet would not send us back into the 'stone age of communication'. Losing culture/art would be much more costly. I agree that people will still make music even if they can't profit from it but the best music is made by someone who can invest all of their time into it. Having a full time jobs and trying to create great music will likely result in mediocre music.
Mass-distribution recorded music has existed for barely more than a century. Are you suggesting that the only music of any value ever created, was created in the last century?
There are even better (as in, economically more efficient) ways of financing culture production with technology. For example, consider a situation where playback devices were (perhaps intermittently) connected to the internet, were able to track audio fingerprints of music they played back, and had a tax on their sale. The proceeds of that tax could be redirected in proportion to the popularity of particular works. You wouldn't have to worry about sharing or lending. Everyone could consume as much as they wanted to, and there would still be the benefits of competition.
But instead, we have anti-free-market approaches that institute monopolies. And companies have massive vested interests in perpetuating those government-granted monopolies. The purpose of copyright is to incentivize the creation of works of art. Extending the copyright term for existing works has no such justification; but that's exactly what corporations were able to convince Congress to do with the Sonny-Bono act.
Recording industry != art & culture. The recording industry is an artifact of a particular distribution medium (e.g. records and radio). The Internet has rendered both of those distribution mechanisms obsolete. Therefore, unless the recording industry can adapt and adopt new methods of distribution, it deserves to die.
Conflating the recording industry with art and culture (or even music) in general is like conflating Amtrak with the concept of 'transportation' in general. Losing the recording industry won't deny us music any more than the loss of Amtrak will deny us transportation.
Or the business model changes, perhaps we revert back to patronage. Or they make money by touring and through merchandising; isn't that how most artists earn money anyway?. Or better yet, their fans still buy their stuff even though they can get it for free because they want to support them.
Copyright is not the only way to financially motivate progress in culture. Public subsidy toward individuals who have enhanced culture is already a working model, and we've also had institutions like this in the past (even in the U.S. government, see Federal Project Number One).
If people create useful original content, others can reward them so as to promote future development. Donating to your favorite artist or an emerging talent should be the nature of our cultural progress, rather than the selfish strive for exuberant compensation. If money is actually necessary to produce better than what you'd call "mediocre" content, we can establish public systems to direct money for those purposes.
I highly doubt money is so necessary anyway, considering audio and video equipment and editing software are easier and easier to attain. There are kids creating music and uploading it to Soundcloud every single day, giving it away, and forming networks to distribute this content with their friends. Some of them can produce some really amazing music with _very_ cheap equipment. I could produce objectively more sophisticated music in thirty minutes with a kaossilator I've had sitting in my garage for five years, than probably any song in the top-100 charts right now -- sans auto tuned vocals.
I know that's "mainstream" hit piece, but it's true. You can't honestly tell me when you think "progress in culture" you imagine that most of our cultural funding should go toward "artists" who do not actually produce their own content, but rather sell their public image. Somebody with barely any experience in music production can produce a pop song similar to most of the popular content out there. It's all being dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, who is then conditioned to expect even dumber content in the future.
How easy is it for actually creative music to be accepted by a wider audience? Not easy, when the distribution channels are owned by the people representing the distributors and producers of the content. Then the Cable companies also are owned by those organizations too, and it becomes a sick and twisted mess.
Further proof is shown in television. BBC and NOVA and NPR and other organizations have far more accurate and superior scientific and culturally educational programming and journalism, but they're publicly funded. Whereas the History channel probably hasn't played a single history program for years, and runs "Modern Marvels" reruns every hour on the weekend until the next primetime spot for "Ice Road Truckers" opens up. The Science and discovery channels almost never produce unique or interesting content.
These organizations and their strangleholds on our legislative process keep the status quo of copyright intact, even despite grave consequences to our personal liberties, knowing full well that their financial benefit has a more immediate and self-perpetuating impact on society. It's disgraceful.
Why can't a more universal public funding system be embraced, considering we have the technology to do it? If we care about personal liberties and advances in communication, we should take innovative steps in that direction.
But the thing is that we won't lose what culture we already have.
Books aren't scarce anymore. You could not, in several life times, read all the books on project Gutenberg. Yet not a single one of those is protected by copyright today.
