The following article may very well blow the roof off the whole debate on copyright and give a valid reason for it's abolition.
Privacy.
This exact thing is a very huge concern for the majority of the population. In recent years, people have become very concerned about being spied on and their private data sold to corporations, especially with shady spots like the Utah Data Center, which is reported to have trillions of terabytes of private data.
Now many will be asking the question, "What does any of this have to do with copyright? Those laws are to protect the works of people and corporations."
That's exactly what I'm trying to get at. Copyright makes information, which is and always has been intangible, proprietary and many things, especially source code and recipes are kept from the public's eye. How does this tie in with privacy concerns? Well, first you have to take into account the previously mentioned fact. Corporations keep proprietary source code out of the public's view and punish those who distribute it. Now, the major point about it being a privacy issue is the fact that you cannot see what corporations put into the source code of their products, making it impossible to tell if they're selling your info or not. Think about it, if all software was open-source, transparency would protect all from everything done behind closed doors. Everyone could freely check the code to make sure there's no secret data collection algorithm.
The same thing applies to food, drink and drugs. The label may tell you the ingredients, but unless the recipe is public and updated in real-time, who knows? They could be sneaking drops of rat poison into consumables without the public's knowledge. The FDA will not even let us study genetically-modified organisms, which are unpredictable in the nature of how the human body reacts to them.
The bottom line is that so much evil is done in the dark. If we were to abolish copyright laws and make everything in the past, present and future public domain, it would not only mean safety for all of us, but for future generations as well.
~Noah Bangs