The Internet and digital technologies have shifted the default legal state of all digital culture from 'unregulated' to 'regulated by copyright,' because every use of digital content creates a copy and therefore triggers copyright law, whereas in physical space most uses (reading, giving away, reselling) do not require permission.

The average copyright term has tripled from approximately 32 years in 1973 to 95 years in 2003, primarily because Congress has extended existing copyrights eleven times in the past forty years rather than allowing works to enter the public domain as the Copyright Clause requires.

Media ownership concentration has increased dramatically, with five companies now controlling approximately 85 percent of media sources, three companies expected to control 85 percent of media within a few years, and four companies controlling 90 percent of radio advertising revenues, whereas previously media ownership was distributed across many more independent entities.

The DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) makes it illegal to distribute information about how to circumvent copyright protection technologies, even when the circumvention itself would be legal fair use—for example, Ed Felten's academic paper describing weaknesses in encryption systems, or aibopet.com's code enabling owners to teach Sony Aibo robots new tricks.

George Eastman's invention of roll film made photography accessible to ordinary people by lowering costs and reducing required skill, analogous to how the Internet has made content creation and distribution accessible to ordinary people, yet copyright law has not adapted proportionally to this democratization.

Documentary filmmaker Jon Else could not afford to include a 4.5-second incidental shot of The Simpsons in his film because Fox demanded $10,000 in licensing fees, forcing him to digitally replace it, illustrating how copyright law makes derivative cultural works prohibitively expensive even when the use would clearly be fair use.

The United States government pressured South Africa and worked with pharmaceutical companies to prevent the importation of generic HIV medications from countries like India, prioritizing intellectual property rights over the lives of 15-30 million Africans who would die without access to affordable antiretroviral drugs.

In America, 43 million citizens downloaded music in May 2003, making them all technically felons under copyright law, creating a 'permission culture' where government regulation transforms ordinary behavior into crime rather than changing the law to match reality.

Doujinshi (Japanese fan-created derivative comics that transform existing manga) number over 33,000 circles of creators producing content that is technically illegal under Japanese copyright law, yet the market flourishes because the volume of enforcement would be prohibitive, demonstrating that legal and actual regulation diverge when enforcement costs are high.

Walt Disney built his creative empire by taking stories from the public domain (fairy tales like Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, and Pinocchio) and transforming them into animated films, exactly the kind of 'building upon the past' that would be illegal under current copyright law if the originals had been under copyright.

The motion picture industry was founded by filmmakers fleeing Thomas Edison's patent monopoly that controlled film technology, establishing that new industries emerge precisely where old monopolies are escapable.

Television and film studios initially competed with radio and telephone companies, but through mergers and acquisitions, they became integrated with these industries, concentrating media ownership in a way that reduced diversity of voices and independent production.

The Wright brothers' invention of the airplane forced American law to reconsider the principle that property owners owned rights from the ground to the heavens, demonstrating that the law adjusts when technology creates obvious conflicts with outdated property rules.

Edwin Howard Armstrong's invention of FM radio was superior to AM radio but was deliberately stifled by RCA, which controlled the AM market, through corporate and legal pressure on the FCC, resulting in Armstrong's bankruptcy and suicide—demonstrating how corporations use government power to protect themselves against superior competing technologies.

Radio stations do not pay recording artists for broadcasting recordings—only composers are paid—which means recording artists give radio stations a valuable performance right for free, yet Congress has declined to extend this payment requirement despite a century of requests, demonstrating that copyright has never been about maximizing payments to creators but about balancing creator and public interests.

Code (software and hardware architecture) operates as a form of law that enforces copyright control without judicial review or fair use exceptions: once a copyright protection technology is built into hardware or software, it enforces rules absolutely without the flexibility or due process that courts provide.

Lessig lost the Eldred v. Ashcroft case partly because he focused on constitutional principle rather than persuading the Justices that the issue was important enough to warrant intervention against Congress.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office stated that open-source software 'runs counter to the mission of WIPO' because open source represents 'waiving' intellectual property rights, suggesting that the government believes copyright holders should not be permitted to voluntarily license their work on terms that reduce their control.

Formalities in copyright law (registration, renewal, marking) should be reinstated because without them, it is impossible for creators to know what is protected and what is not, or to find copyright owners to ask permission from, making the permission system unworkable.

The copyright system was originally designed with formalities (registration, marking, renewal requirements) that ensured most creative works would enter the public domain within a generation, but these formalities were abolished in 1976 when Congress followed European copyright law, making copyright automatic and perpetual in practice.