Just to be clear, when talking about selling or licensing copyrights, I'm really talking about deals where someone other than the original artist has either permanent or temporary control of those rights.
I would agree that if you can't at least grant temporary rights to make copies for the purposes of accessing the work, copyright is of limited usefulness in the Internet age. (Of course, this in itself is a relatively modern concern as well. If you go back far enough, it really would have been the copyright holder who was physically making all the copies anyway, and no licensing at all would have been necessary).
I think a lot of the trouble with copyright in practice today comes down to precisely that disconnect between the original artist and the long-term copyright holder. If copyrights could not be transferred, only delegated for a relatively short period, then all the middleman industries that tend to take the lion's share of the profits today at the expense of both artist and public would necessarily become subservient to the artists again, which I think would fix a lot of problems. If you are only going to get your contract as a distributor/marketer/whatever renewed after six months if you've been getting good returns for the artist for a fair price, and the artist can take their best-selling book or platinum-selling album to another distributor next week if they aren't happy with the deal, then a lot of inequalities get balanced out.
Then again, the Internet will probably render most middleman distributors irrelevant soon anyway. The process has already started, it's just that for now it remains the preserve of the technically knowledgeable and the trailblazers. Hopefully, as self-publishing becomes more mainstream, the result will be a rise of a new class of companies who provide actually useful/valuable services to artists, such as editorial/design work for authors or effective promotion that generates measurable returns for musicians.
Moreover, if transfers of rights could only be temporary, then an estate could only benefit for a genuinely limited time from the work of a deceased artist, instead of several generations receiving income in return for doing nothing effectively in perpetuity. It would be enough that an artist who had invested hard work in creating something valuable that should support his or her family could know that their family really would be supported for a while in the event of their untimely death, which seems reasonably fair, but that would be it.
I would agree that if you can't at least grant temporary rights to make copies for the purposes of accessing the work, copyright is of limited usefulness in the Internet age. (Of course, this in itself is a relatively modern concern as well. If you go back far enough, it really would have been the copyright holder who was physically making all the copies anyway, and no licensing at all would have been necessary).
I think a lot of the trouble with copyright in practice today comes down to precisely that disconnect between the original artist and the long-term copyright holder. If copyrights could not be transferred, only delegated for a relatively short period, then all the middleman industries that tend to take the lion's share of the profits today at the expense of both artist and public would necessarily become subservient to the artists again, which I think would fix a lot of problems. If you are only going to get your contract as a distributor/marketer/whatever renewed after six months if you've been getting good returns for the artist for a fair price, and the artist can take their best-selling book or platinum-selling album to another distributor next week if they aren't happy with the deal, then a lot of inequalities get balanced out.
Then again, the Internet will probably render most middleman distributors irrelevant soon anyway. The process has already started, it's just that for now it remains the preserve of the technically knowledgeable and the trailblazers. Hopefully, as self-publishing becomes more mainstream, the result will be a rise of a new class of companies who provide actually useful/valuable services to artists, such as editorial/design work for authors or effective promotion that generates measurable returns for musicians.
Moreover, if transfers of rights could only be temporary, then an estate could only benefit for a genuinely limited time from the work of a deceased artist, instead of several generations receiving income in return for doing nothing effectively in perpetuity. It would be enough that an artist who had invested hard work in creating something valuable that should support his or her family could know that their family really would be supported for a while in the event of their untimely death, which seems reasonably fair, but that would be it.