As Hegel intimates, it would be anticlimactic if the history of the world was leading to something as sobering as dictatorship. Yet extreme copyright “progression” is depressing – it is failing to reduce subjugation in developing countries, divisive nationalism in middle-income countries, and entertainment imprisonment in developed countries. We need freedom from oppression, prejudice, and overconsumption. Yet legal reform may not come soon.

We humans, unlike beasts and gods, have many needs and are insufficient in ourselves. We are in art’s grip, needing to consume and create art for the intellectual stimulation, for the challenge, for the joy of standing in the presence of beauty and communicating with fellow humans. There may be no escaping it. Or, if escape is possible, freedom from art is an ill-advised strategy for living. Given the importance of art to our being, the regulation of it through copyright is of fundamental importance.

Copyright must support the human quest for progress, in which creativity plays an essential part. In developing countries, where few besides the elite can afford to create, copyright’s purpose should be to help artwork from all corners of the globe promote freedom, equality, and human rights; to achieve this, copyright must be minimized.2 In middle-income countries, where more individuals have the opportunity to make a living and to draw fulfillment from creating, moderate copyright can play a larger role in assisting artists to construct a sense of national identity and inclusiveness; by fostering cultural creation, copyright also fosters a collective historical and romantic sense of the common good. Finally, in developed countries, a vast majority of the population has the luxury to create, yet copyright encourages the passive overconsumption of art; if individuals are to resist the sclerotic hardening of their character by creating art, copyright’s power must be diminished.

John W. Davis reminds us of the immense importance of getting the law right so that others can make their contributions to society. But, just as good doctors or teachers are careful to tailor their work to each particular patient or pupil, we need to tailor copyright law to the needs of societies. If we continue to assume that copyright should function uniformly, then copyright law will continue to do harm to all those who are not the equivalent of the standard patient or pupil. In truth, the perversity of the current global copyright regime is mind-boggling. Imagine the principal law governing health care reducing overall health – even for the rich. Imagine the principal law regulating education actually making kids less intelligent on average. However, if we acknowledge that copyright can play numerous roles and that its effects depend on social variations, then we can turn it into a force for good.

In prerevolutionary, eighteenth-century France, the Low Enlightenment of popular media – anti-monarchist essays, materialist philosophical treatises, social and cultural criticism, religious satire, utopian visions, pornographic novels – produced works that were not unequivocally progressive or necessarily skillful masterpieces.2 Their authors – “the men who wrote the bestsellers of prerevolutionary France, yet … have disappeared from literary history”3 – have been described as the Rousseaus du ruisseau (Rousseaus of the gutter).4 Low Enlightenment works, though at times smutty or libelous, were mass consumed and often explicitly or implicitly spread worthy ideals.5 Robert Darnton states, “The men of Grub Street [Low Enlightenment authors] believed in the message of the philosophes.”6

We do not owe copyright law any nostalgia. Extreme copyright laws are altering cultures across the globe. Given that we are already engineering culture through law, we need to seriously consider the unintended negative harms that result. Since cultures will and should change over time, so should the law that relates to culture – i.e., copyright law will and should change along with the culture it governs. Thus attempts to reform copyright should not be dismissed on the grounds that reform will alter our culture, given that copyright has already fundamentally done so and continues to do so.

In the spirit of Richelieu, entertainment multinationals seek to increase their wealth by subduing the prospects of the poor in developing countries. Their misguided quest for ever more profit leads them to lobby Congress to exert pressure on poor countries to enact and maintain extreme copyright laws.2 As a result, excessive copyright protections in developing countries suppress education and the adoption of human rights because they make it more expensive to access knowledge and entertainment.3

Art is vital to us all. The diversity of its benefits rivals the variety within humankind. This is because art is our attempt to reach out to others. On the other end of that connection, the consumption of art refreshes us and offers us the possibility of joining ourselves to others’ life experiences. After a day full of bureaucracy, paperwork, expectations, commands, judgments, callousness, and grind, we search for stories of humor, adventure, lust, or gentleness. But, in our exhaustion, we often seek connection that demands little energy – consumption of entertainment. Some such entertainment may be crucial to our well-being. In the words of Rosemary Coombe, “the consumption of commodified representational forms is productive activity in which people engage in meaning-making to adapt signs, texts, and images to their own agendas.”2