Hear an argument more from my side of the fence here.
Unfortunately that argument starts with a quote from someone who got it completely wrong as Sousa didn't realise that the new technology would benefit creators, not silence them.
As for the new remix culture that the speaker claims is now democratising creativity - utter nonsense.
There's nothing new about that, that's how culture and creativity has always worked. Rather than my try and explain that at length,
go and watch these entertaining films about this. The last one also touches on copyright in the modern world and if I recall correctly also mentions how people view copying of others work [perfectly OK] and how they view their own work being copied [completely not OK].
I find Larry Lessig's argument overall to be quite poor as he uses analogies by twisting and then misrepresenting them. I was surprised to see that he was a 'respected' lawyer as his arguments were so weak. He doesn't appear to have noticed hip-hop and notice how sampling was overtly used used in that musical form. Not to mention that he is also naive in the assumption that the 'youth' making remixes for YouTube are not involved in a commercial enterprise, which is exactly what YouTube is. And there is money to be made by those supplying content and by YouTube who provides a platform. This is why YouTube gets a cease and desist not the uploader. If the person whose content was being reused got a cut of the profits being made, then that would be very different, but they do not.
As for the kids being corrupted by being criminalised, grief, if shoplifting was as popular, would he also advocate decriminalising that too?
That's the worst TED presentation I've ever seen. Larry Lessig seems quite ignorant about remix culture and somewhat naive in general.
BTW I had a look at your website Chris, some very nice work there indeed, but I was then struck by the fact that you are a commercial photographer.
Now that type of photography would be little affected by a decrease in copyright as that type of work tend to have good rewards up front and not only you may also hand over copyright, but commercial work rarely has a use outside of the commission itself. Many other types of photographic business models tend to pay smaller amounts over longer periods of time, so are utterly dependent on the concept of photographic copyright. So do you think your views on freeing up copyright are influenced by the fact it wouldn't really affect you?