RE: All information at your hands is yours. You can use it how you like. But they will try to stop you.
@heretickitten I'm interested to know what your usual occupation is. Something tells me you don't need to feed a family from your own intellectual property, but I could be wrong.
While I'm here, I'd like to address some of your points.
"Lose the ability to freely share ideas, and we might as well not even use this internet"- Nobody is restricted from sharing their own ideas. If you have an idea, you can share it freely. Don't you think other peoples ideas have value? What about artistic creations, discoveries and inventions?
You use the words idea and information interchangeably, yet they are very different things.
Copyright is censorship. Censorship is bad.
Sure, they're both concerned with regulating what people say, but for utterly different reasons. Censorship is about thoughts and ideas being ideologically evil or "offensive". Copyright is about thoughts and ideas having value. In some ways, they are completely opposite.
I believe we have a reasonable paradigm now, where creatives and inventors are free to share their own ideas and creations through creative commons, and they can also choose to protect their intellectual property. The open-source world has taken off and been a great aspect of technology. As a consumer, you have the choice to pay for stuff legally, take free stuff that is given out free, or steal stuff that is protected by copyright.
As a musician, graphic designer and photographer, in my opinion, your insistence that peoples hard work should be released and shared for free by default, is utterly contemptible. I give a lot of work out for free, but it is my prerogative if I want to charge for it, and it is utterly unfair that someone on the other side of the world can sell my work, and claim it as their own.
I've always used the arts as a way to express myself, but I've heard that trying to make money off of it is quite a challenge.
That's why I don't try to make money off of intangible products like ideas or information; instead, I build things with my knowledge. I'm an engineer.
Scientific information is for anyone and everyone, and that information can be taught by teachers, read in books, repeated infinitely, but engineered products are real. Same with any information. All ideas should be copied and used. Ideas and concepts within the creative world of the arts should be respected, but that doesn't mean that they can't be duplicated.
It's the difference between a painting and a .jpg file of a painting.
It's the difference between downloading an album, and seeing a band play live.
One is a real product or event that cannot be copied, and one is a bundle of data, which can be copied without effort.
Same with your art and ideas. Once you've written something down on the internet, you've put it into a medium where it can be duplicated infinitely for free. People will do so, and there is little you can do to stop them, unless you want to forcefully censor people using the government or something. I disapprove of that sort of thing though, and I'm not going to recall my anti-government stance just because it'd favor my wallet.
Not only that, but it's not so much what's right or wrong, but rather, the reality of the situation.
If it can be copied, it will be copied. That's just how it is.
How you deal with that is up to you, but I'm one to say: If you want to make a living, do what is profitable. Not what's fun. Arts 'n crafts is a fun hobby in school, but this world is cruel. Deliver something useful or un-reproducible, or you'll starve.