Copyright is useful, just not in its current state where it's being abused.
I'd agree—and I'm not contradicting my earlier comment by saying that. It's that what passes as breach of copyright and patent law is so finely ground that neither corporate or national interests are properly served.
So much time is wasted on protecting stuff that either isn't really a breach (so close to prior art) or on developments that are so trivial that they effectively amount to very little, that is the overall net result/outcomre is negative (even the winners only achieve a Pyrrhic victory).
The only people who truly benefit from this over-grinding of the law are those in countries whose laws allow more flexibility. The over-fine grinding of law also acts as a disincentive as it's intimidatory, people aren't going to invest in developing products if they have to spend most of the profits from them on litigation brought on by competitors whose principal aim is to just thwart competition.
We in the West really need to wake up over the damage bad copyright and overly long (and often imbecilic and trivial) patents have caused, they've slowed progress down and made its overhead much more complicated.
I'm not against patent and copyright law per se but they ought to be both reasonable and workable. Currently, they benefit few.
When we have so-called 'legal' information raiders like Elsevier and that illegal ones like Sci Hub have to come into existence to redress the balance then it's obvious even to Blind Freddy that our IP laws are fucked (i.e.: favor few at the expense of the national interest/population at large).