I think there will be a huge change in public perception of copyright in general, as increasingly more people realise that everything is a derivative work.
Most people find the traditional explanation for copyright, "everything emerges from the commons and eventually returns to the commons, so artists and creators should be entitled to ownership of intellectual property for a limited amount of time." The problem becomes when "limited" is stretched from 5 years from moment of publishing, say, to an artist's life + 150 years. Most people find the former reasonable and the latter ridiculous.
The problem is (almost) everything the US has a competitive edge on is based on copyright.
I'm in Europe, and during the past few weeks with these tariff upsets, I kinda realized the only thing I use or own that are US-made are computers and software.
If someone could hack into Apple, download the schematics of their chips and the source for their OS, and then post it on the internet, after which a third party could sell commercial products based on said data, there wouldn't be a software/hardware economy around of very long.
> If someone could hack into Apple, download the schematics of their chips and the source for their OS, and then post it on the internet, after which a third party could sell commercial products based on said data, there wouldn't be a software/hardware economy around of very long.
Part of this tension arises out of a social understanding: we want competition precisely because we value the way it keeps an industry/nation "alive" --- there will be "winners and losers"--- and yet we also want to balance that with a coherent idea of ownership such that it's not just a complete lawless free-for-all. In other words, we don't want intellectual property to be too strong because it's economically and culturally stultifying.
Business interests naturally seek the complete nullification of competition, so they promote as strong as possible copyright protections; while the vox populi understands that common culture is the primordial goo that all intellectual property arises out of and returns to and finds copyright at base rather arbitrary. The legal, political, and social, understanding of copyright we have has arisen out of balancing these competing interests (themselves in productive competition) understanding that finding the right balance is precisely what has made a country like America, for example, so successful.
That the balance seems so out of whack in the direction of large and monopoly seeking business suggests the ways in which large business interests exerts undo influence on the legal and political landscape.
