I don’t think that copyright is bad, per se. I do, however, see that copyright enforcement is often overreaching and it appears to be because some people running a business somewhere don’t want to fail. The business model of “creating content” is simply not something that scales into a billion dollar company in the age of the internet.

Perhaps this is mistaken. Disney and Nintendo come to mind as very successful but also very aggressive about protecting copyright, even such that (as you brought up with the Tolkien estate) Disney has successfully lobbied to have copyright terms extended so they can be the only arbiters of all things Mickey Mouse (and Nintendo all things Mario, etc.). But Nintendo keeps making (good!) Mario games.

Still, there could be great works produced by independent creators but they seem to be stifled precisely due to copyright law. When Disney bought Star Wars, they decided that all non-film iterations of the stories are non-canon. Imagine being an Expanded Universe creator who made an Official Star Wars Game only to be told after-the-fact that it’s not official anymore. That’s not even getting into fan creations which are somehow illegally distributed for free.

I might agree that it’s not fundamentally broken but it does not seem to work in practice; at least, there are many cases in which it is abused which need to be curbed for me to really consider it a Good Thing. Commonly a person’s labor is invalidated by dubious copyright claims and I see that as more harmful to society than what harms are caused to corporations by individual piracy. Let corporations duke it out with copyright law and ignore the individual consumer, even if it’s millions of individuals. Such a scenario means the business model doesn’t work and that is absolutely not a consumer problem.

(Thanks for sharing your thoughts! There is a lot of nuance around this topic so I apologize if my initial comment over-simplified.)