[mindslight]

The original purpose was to incentivize creative works, and the desirability of that hasn't really gone away. For example, Free software would be a lot further along if there could be a lucrative business model behind it.

Enforcement is just utterly at odds with physics and at this point, the idea of "owning" control of bits in someone else's possession is incompatible with a free society.

[tremon]

Actually, it was "to promote science and the useful arts". Not all creative works.

[CuriousSkeptic]

This (obviously biased) text has an entirely different take http://questioncopyright.org/promise

"The first copyright law was a censorship law. It was not about protecting the rights of authors, or encouraging them to produce new works. Authors' rights were in little danger in sixteenth-century England, and the recent arrival of the printing press (the world's first copying machine) was if anything energizing to writers. So energizing, in fact, that the English government grew concerned about too many works being produced, not too few. The new technology was making seditious reading material widely available for the first time, and the government urgently needed to control the flood of printed matter, censorship being as legitimate an administrative function then as building roads."

[zanny]

There are plenty of lucrative business models behind free software - look at anything from Red Hat, who uses support contracts to fund development, to Krita, which uses crowdfunding each year to fund full time development. And within that spectrum you have projects like Qt, which offers proprietary licensing to appease lawyers to fund development of what will soon be a fully open source toolkit. Gitlab is doing fine despite their platform being open source, too.

At that, I agree that when you are offered a government enforced monopoly on information, that will be much easier to extort revenue from users with than trying to use one of these alternative means of funding development and profiting from information creative work. But like you said, its wholly imaginary and artificial.