The only good justification is the one noted in the United States Constitution: to promote the useful arts and sciences. If you give a creator exclusive legal right to use (and thereby to profit) from a creation for a period of time, you insure that the creator will profit from the creation to the extent others find it useful (because if they don't, then they don't want to use it, and so it doesn't matter if you have exclusive rights, because no one would pay anyway, and so no boon is granted to creators of crappy stuff, because although they enjoy exclusive rights, there is no hope of profit).
In my view, this is better than the two main alternatives that have existed in history, the patron system (where rich folks pay artists to hang around and do art, etc.) and the government sponsor system (where a beaurocrat hands out checks to folks) because it allows for a defacto popular vote as to which creators get rewarded, and which don't.
A neccessary consequence of this system, however, is the idea that the exclusive protections should only be granted for a period which is sufficient to incentivize creators to create, that is to say to allow good ones to make a decent living, and to allow average ones to make a really good living. I suspect that currently the protections in place exceed these bounds, perhaps radicly so.
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The only good justification is the one noted in the United States Constitution: to promote the useful arts and sciences. If you give a creator exclusive legal right to use (and thereby to profit) from a creation for a period of time, you insure that the creator will profit from the creation to the extent others find it useful (because if they don't, then they don't want to use it, and so it doesn't matter if you have exclusive rights, because no one would pay anyway, and so no boon is granted to creators of crappy stuff, because although they enjoy exclusive rights, there is no hope of profit). In my view, this is better than the two main alternatives that have existed in history, the patron system (where rich folks pay artists to hang around and do art, etc.) and the government sponsor system (where a beaurocrat hands out checks to folks) because it allows for a defacto popular vote as to which creators get rewarded, and which don't. A neccessary consequence of this system, however, is the idea that the exclusive protections should only be granted for a period which is sufficient to incentivize creators to create, that is to say to allow good ones to make a decent living, and to allow average ones to make a really good living. I suspect that currently the protections in place exceed these bounds, perhaps radicly so.