An argument for copyright protections, or against the copyright system as a whole?

Art can transport us to new places, help us understand more what it is to be human, help us empathize with our fellow beings, and help us understand our society in new ways.  For some of these goals, but especially the last one, an effective tool for hundreds of years has been to take an existing popular work and modify it, in a way to make people look at it in a different way and think about the original differently, but also to think about society differently through the lens of what the original meant.  Older examples can be found in classical music, with composers using existing melodies and creating variations - for example in Saint-Saens Carnival of the Animals, he takes the quick Can-Can from oftenbach and plays it slow to represent turtles, and for his "fossil" movement he quotes from his own and others pieces to represent old and tired musical fossiles.  More recently, you could point to Andy Warhol's cambel soup pieces, or his Marlyn Monroe, and his comments on our society and our icons through variations on those.  One recent variation has been to take a scene of a movie on Hitler's downfall and dub over it, making it look as though he and his generals are talking about the Conan-Leno debate, overly strict grammar, etc...  The production company has finally gotten around to working with Google to take all of these down, which is their right as the copyright holder, but makes me wonder whether copyright holders should be granted such rights by our society.

"Constantin Film, the production company behind the Adolf Hitler film "Downfall" that spawned hundreds of Internet parodies, defended its decision to have YouTube remove the clips in part as a response to complaints from those satirized in them.

The company's Munich office was bombarded with calls and emails after YouTube began pulling down the "Downfall" spoofs -- part of a meme, in Internet parlance -- on orders from Constantin.

The parodies use the same premise: snatch the film's climatic scene, in which Bruno Ganz as Hitler is told he cannot win the war, and add new subtitles to make the Fuhrer rail against anything from the iPad to the new Hannah Montana album.

"Enough is enough, really. It's a matter of principle," Schurhoff said. "It's Constantin's film, and they have a right to say how the images get used."

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/world/news/e3i406245...