The term "useful Arts" is not about "art" as we use the term today. To my understanding, that phrase was specifically about practical skills in the language of the day this was written. It is not "my" restriction.
And again, I would rather have "lacking" artistic offerings in exchange for more sane copyright laws. Besides, there's a certain passion that comes through underdog artists that isn't there in most larger commercial offerings.
I am one of those underdog artists. Copyright protection is literally the only leverage point I have available in any sort of business negotiation. They don't typically give out subsidies or tax breaks for films with a sub-$1 million budget. And while I don't argue for the sort of extreme copyright terms we have now such as 95 years, I do want robust copyright protection at minimal registration cost because it creates a level economic playing field for creative people who do original work.
I am a musician as well. I don't make money out of it, and I understand how hard it is to make money in arts.
The question is, should these sorts of economic incentives exist, and to what scale, given their downsides? Any incentive will drive people into playing the game and optimizing their take, driving the global legislation problems we are currently facing.
Art has always been a poor man's game throughout human history. I think the age we live in now is an anomaly with respect to personal arts and IP-based commercial funding. Historical economic success I can think of would be found in notable performance artists, instrument manufacturers, conservatory instructors, and patronage. None of these are really IP related, but personal skill related and involved in the trade of tangible goods & services found from a particular individual or group, regardless of their ability to be copied.
I certainly don't favor 95 year copyright terms of the Disney variety, or even life + 70 for authors - more like 35-50 for collective/corporate works and life terms for authors, or maybe some combination of the two, although that would be tricky to administrate.
I also think that there should be a few different levels of licensing (much like the Creative Commons approach) and possibly some sort of price controls for licensing, to be reflective of the fixed pricing for copyright registration that currently obtains. In general I'm against price controls, though, and going down that route could lead to mandatory licensing which would also be undesirable (eg you find your passionate song about freedom used in a political campaign commercial by a candidate whose values you find repellent, and can do nothing about it because anybody has the right to unilaterally license anything).
Other people have proposed increasing copyright renewal fees over time, or renewal fees that were somehow keyed to the economic performance of a copyrighted work, though I think both these approaches are problematic.
You do know that crappy Minecraft videos are a direct result of people pursuing money through systems strongly influenced by copyright legislation, right?
YouTube's financial incentivization optimizes towards crappy Minecraft videos moreso than high production value content, since they started rewarding time spent watching over total number of views/subscribers. Such videos are the easiest to create in terms of effort per posted minute of video that is attractive to (enough) viewers.
One of the popular groups (Game Grumps) even explicitly have said so in their videos. Arin/Egoraptor is an animator, but animations are hard work to create and aren't rewarded financially on YouTube anymore, so he specifically went into something where he could make money (doing Let's Plays).
Basically, what you see popular on YT is not because of what people are passionate about, but rather what YT's schemes optimize people to do with their financial carrot.
I'm not seeing your logic here. I understand YouTube's economic incentive to reward time spent watching because they can show more ads, but I don't see how that really stems from copyright. I mean, the copyright situation is the same whether I make a 60 second slapstick animation or an hours-long nature video.*
But copyright just establishes title, and provides the right to recover additional damages from infringers if you register it with Congress. It doesn't set any sort of price structure, so it's perfectly OK to buy the rights to someone's work $1 if you can persuade them to sell at that price (as many session musicians have found out the hard way).
* in passing, I noticed recently that multi-hour videos of rainfall are crazy popular on YT, presumably because of their use as a sleep aid.
And again, I would rather have "lacking" artistic offerings in exchange for more sane copyright laws. Besides, there's a certain passion that comes through underdog artists that isn't there in most larger commercial offerings.