Times That Copyright Expansion Has Historically Fucked Over Artists On An Institutional Level:
Sampling rights becoming prohibitively expensive to use by small artists
Musicians being forced to sign over sampling rights to their record company, making any benefits they would hypothetically gain moot.
The Digital Milennium Copyright Act leading to the vidmaker-stomping nightmare that is ContentID
The DMCA leading to making it harder than ever to preserve media due to the way it prohibits tinkering with any locks the megacorps put on it, meaning it's way easier for artists' hard work to end up vaulted and lost.
The way basic chord progressions and musical styles have become copyrightable thanks to various lawsuits by the Marvin Gaye estate
The fact that the artists of the past used to be able to remix; adapt and iterate on art made within 56 years of them, likely created in their lifetimes, and now artists can only do those things with art produced nearly a century ago by people long dead.
New and independent artists being crowded out of the market by megacorp-owned IPs that would be public domain (and thusly convey less of an overwhelming advantage-via-marquee-value to megacorps) if the US had its pre-1976 copyright laws.
Times That Copyright Expansion Has Actually Materially Helped Artists On An Institutional Level:
