Copyright protects expression. It affords people protection for creating their work. With the copyright acts, authors, composers, producers, programmers do not worry about their works being stolen and used without their authorization. They feel safe to earn more money. It is good that copyright law protects everybody’s original works.

However, while copyright law protects individual’s work or a small group’s profits, it pulls the original individual work away from the whole human being within a long period of time (even 70 years after the creators’ death). Meanwhile, copyright is in someway prevents communication, which in the modern time is an important way for our society to develop. An example from http://www.eff.org/IP/ says: “You'd like to move the tracks you bought from Rhapsody to a personal stereo like Apple's iPod, but the copy protection prevents you. Creating or using the software necessary to make the switch could put you behind bars.” Copyright law has been used by some company as a tool to earn money. They control the licence. Anyone wants to use the licence should pay money to them.

With the fear of no development of the future society, there is a Fair Use Law to allow individual works being use in non-profit educational purpose. The use by reproduction in copies or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not against of copyright law. But not just education needs to use the creations; other fields need the creations more.

“Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.” (Larry Lessig, Free Culture) If Tomas Edison asked for copyright for every invention he made, our society wouldn’t develop so rapidly and we wouldn’t have a comfortable life.

So, it is good that copyright protects individual’s hard work, but the term should be limited. After all, in the long term, the inventor’s work belongs to all human races.