Bargain, not balance.

I hadn't seen Richard Stallman's essay Misinterpreting Copyright before. It's very good, especially the bit about the "striking a balance" myth. Read it.

He also points out that we should measure the effectiveness (and necessity) of copyright extensions by the number of actual works produced, and not by what copyright holders say they want. (Of course they want more power. What else would they say?)

It's amazing that so much of the copyright debate is centered around what makes copyright holders feel good, and not on what actually seems to promote creation. Not that it's easy to measure that sort of thing, but anything would be better than taking their word for it.