"Shall have the power", "to promote the progress".
As far as I see it, that's all we need to drop every single copyright law now founded on actual research (just about all of them) and swap them out for something else entirely, if we find something that has a better effect for society.
And I disagree entirely on the view on Youtube and Pandora. You may not like their position, but as far as I can see they haven't destroyed anybody's creative career. We shouldn't be building intellectual minefields and be petty and territorial.
I don't dislike their "position", I dislike the fact that they're essentially even more parasitic on musical creators than the old majors used to be.
Have you ever heard of a streaming service paying a talented band/singer an advance? Or taking out ads? Or setting up press interviews?
Spotify pays about the same per play and listener as radio does. How is that worse than the labels?
Pay for what? YouTube, at least, only hosts user posted content.
The whole point of royalties is to reduce the amount of litigation by having an organized and honorable system of compensation.
The reason YouTube and Pandora have spent the last decade in the courts is precisely because they don't want to have to pay. Instead of being respectful members of society, they decided to hide behind lawyers and put a burden on our publicly funded civil justice systems.
There is nothing in our legal system that will ever allow someone to use someone else's intellectual property and profit from it without compensating the original author. That means that every time someone is selling advertisements on a website around content that is not being compensated, they can be successfully sued for damages, with hundreds of years of common law precedent and statute.
There is no doubt in my mind that intellectual property and copyright have changed drastically from the author-centric in to the corporate-centric form that we have today.
What's needed is reform and a return to an author-centric model, not the wholesale abandonment of copyright.