Also, with computers being functional copyright has become a tool of social control; any function in a physical object can be taken away from you at a whim with no recourse so long as a computer can be inserted into the object. Absent a major change in how society sees copyright I envision a very bleak totalitarian future arising from this trend.
That is, does the amount of creative/economic output dissuaded by allowing AI (preventing people who would not be able to or not want to create art if they couldn't get paid) exceed the creative/economic output of letting people develop and use such AIs?
If that's the case, then novels, news articles, digital images, etc. are things that copyright absolutely makes sense for. If you think that they have a "low cost of production", you are sadly misinformed about the artistic process.
Some of these have vanishingly low marginal costs when it comes to reproduction, but in light of their high fixed cost of production, I don't see how that matters.
100% agree. But even then it's not very good. Abolish copyright, severely limit patents, and leave trademarks as they are. The IP paradigm needs an overhaul.
It's important to consider in any legalistic argument over copyright that, unlike conventional property rights which are to some degree prehistoric, copyright is a recent legal construct that was developed for a particular economic purpose.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_property#History
The existing standards of fair use are what they are because copyright was developed with supporting the art industry as an intentional goal, not because it was handed down from the heavens or follows a basic human instinct. Ancient playwrights clipped each others' ideas liberally; late medieval economists observed that restricting this behavior seemed to encourage more creativity. Copyright law is a creation of humans, for humans, and is subordinate to moral and economic reasoning, not prior to it.